Conspiracy Theory Confirmed: Researcher Shows How Phone Shows Ads Based on Conversations It Hears

Sunday, June 10, 2018
By Paul Martin

While social media companies have spent years denying that their apps are recording your private conversations, the truth is finally coming out.

By John Vibes
TheFreeThoughtProject.com
June 10, 2018

For years, smartphone users have been growing increasingly suspicious that their devices are listening to them to feed them advertisements and to “enhance their experience” on third-party apps. Companies like Google and Facebook have consistently denied these claims, saying that targeted ads and messages are merely a coincidence, and that data for these services are taken in other ways.

However, earlier this year during the Cambridge Analytica scandal we began to see some of the first hints that our phones may actually be listening to us.

In a recent interview with Vice, Dr. Peter Hannay, the senior security consultant for the cybersecurity firm Asterisk, explained how third-party apps exploit a loophole to gather the voice data from your phone.

Hannay said that while your microphone is always on, your voice data is only sent out to other parties if you say specific trigger words such as “Hey Siri” or “OK Google,” but there is a catch. Third-party apps often ask to gain access to voice data in their user agreements to “enhance the experience” of their products.

“From time to time, snippets of audio do go back to [other apps like Facebook’s] servers but there’s no official understanding what the triggers for that are. Whether it’s timing or location-based or usage of certain functions, [apps] are certainly pulling those microphone permissions and using those periodically. All the internals of the applications send this data in encrypted form, so it’s very difficult to define the exact trigger,” Hannay said.

While this process is becoming more obvious by the day, many tech companies continue to deny that they are engaged with this practice, and since all of the outgoing information is encrypted there is no way of telling exactly which information they are getting and how they are using it.

The Rest…HERE

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