We’ve all been there. You spend no more than five minutes talking to your friend about how you need new workout shoes, and next thing you know, hundreds of Nike ads show up in your Facebook feed. Coincidence? — It’s not.
But the tech giants aren’t directly listening to your conversations to get data and feed you specific ads, they do it in a more subtle and cheaper way.
What the evidence says.
Despite the endless conspiracy theories, there isn’t any actual evidence that Google, Facebook, or any other major tech company is actively recording user voice data without their knowing.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal gave us with an idea of the nightmare that would face a company caught secretly recording and sharing private user information.
Of course this doesn’t mean that everybody learned their lesson and that won’t happen again, but it puts companies who want to do it at a huge risk just to have a little more user data. Truth be told, we already give them so much information for free and without even realizing it.
While it is true that smartphones that have a “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google” function are constantly listening, they are not actively processing the information they hear. Keyword triggers like “Hey Siri” need to be used in order to wake up the device from a low power state to a more powerful listening state, in which then it starts recording.
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