Is Your Phone Spying on You? Here are the Facts

Ever get the feeling your smartphone is eavesdropping on you? You’re not alone.

You’re sitting with friends enjoying a nice dinner. You chat freely about this and that until someone mentions a product. They’re unsure if it’s right for them and ask for your opinions. The evening ends, everyone goes home—but later, an ad pops up for that exact product you talked about.

Coincidence? Or are our smartphones analyzing our conversations to later serve us tailored product suggestions?

According to IT expert Adrianus Warmenhoven, it’s not far-fetched at all—these technologies are “everywhere.”

Devices That Talk to Each Other

There are two ways these specific product suggestions find their way onto your smartphone:

By accepting every cookie banner while browsing, you allow advertisers to collect a ton of information about your behavior—often without you even noticing.

This is called “cross-tracking” and it’s a goldmine because it can track your activity across multiple websites.

Even more sneaky are the microphones in our smartphones. They can pick up ultrasonic signals embedded in ads that we can’t hear. So when you walk past a lawnmower ad in a hardware store, your device picks that up. This is called cross-device tracking.

Blocking the Signals

The good news: these signals are relatively weak and can be blocked quite well by physical barriers like walls or bags.

Whether smartphones actually misuse microphones to listen to your conversations hasn’t been 100% proven yet. To stay safe, deny microphone permissions to every app you install.

And if you really want to be sure, you can stash your smartphone during conversations with friends in our shielding smartphone pouch OFLAIN.