Do modern phones spy and listen to what we say? Let’s discover together all the details on modern voice listening technologies.
The ever-present dilemma in the world of telephony is: “does the phone spy on us? Does it see and hear everything we do?”. The answer is not simple but, Generally, the answer is yesgiven that various services and functions are active by default share the voice commands madethe details of the actions performed on the screen and everything we search for or open on TikTok or Instagram.
Let’s find out together how phones listen to us and record us and what we can do to prevent your smartphone from spying and recovering information. This last operation is not at all simple but we can reduce data collection to a minimum.
READ ALSO -> So Alexa is spying on us? what is the solution?
1) Precious “gold” trade data
Knowing in advance what people need or what they like is the basis of modern marketing strategy. Phones easily meet these data collection needs, since they are always in our hands and collect a large amount of data by default browsing data and social preferencesall useful information for create a commercial profile of the user.
It is not even necessary to know our first and last name (no personal data is usually collected); our device or account is assigned a unique ID code, traceable every time we open a site, surf the Internet or simply open Instagram or Tiktok. Whoever collects data for marketing purposes he already knows it’s ussince the unique ID code is read immediately.
Phones also “by mistake” collect many fake voice commands, not addressed to Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri. In addition to legitimate voice commands, phones can then randomly listen to what we say in a room or when we are in the car, adding new information about what we want or desire.
There are companies that work only to analyze commercial information recovered from phones, as seen inRepubblica article.
2) Delete the information collected on Android
To improve privacy on Android it is worth visiting the page My Google Activitieswhere all the data collected by Google is present, shared with authorized partners and often collected for many years in a row.
Other useful pages for protecting privacy are Data and privacy, Personal data search, Google Ad Center.
To delete the device’s advertising ID, simply follow the instructions shown in the Android Help; this will generate a new device ID, leading to the deletion of the old information collected.
We delete everything we consider useless or harmful and, for greater privacy, we activate the system that delete data older than 3 months yourselfas also seen in the guide above how to stop Google from spying on everything.
If, however, the problem is Google Assistant or access to the phone’s microphone, we can read our guides on how to disable Narrator on Android and about how about how to prevent the microphone from turning on by itself on phones.
3) Delete the information collected on iPhone
Apple is significantly more restrictive than Android about sharing data through apps and third-party services. In fact, it all depends on the apps we install and the permissions we give to the individual apps.
On iPhone we can deactivate personalized ads by opening the Settings app and taking us to the menu Privacy and Security -> Apple Advertising. From here we deactivate the switch next to the item Personalized ads.
If the problem is Siri, just read the instructions in our article on how to disable Siri on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.
Conclusions
This type of data collection is inevitable if you want to use a modern smartphone. Even by deactivating and deleting all the entries seen in the previous chapters we cannot block the data collection of the most famous apps (such as WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok), who can then continue to provide us with personalized contentbased on our tastes and desires.
To learn more we can read our guides on how the smartphone recognizes if I speak come on how to find out if we are being spied on your computer.