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So it turns out your phone is eavesdropping on you

Iain

I saw an article today that confirmed what I have suspected for years now - mobile phones have been monitoring us and using the info to sell to advertisers:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr4rvr495rgo

Apple has agreed to pay $95m (£77m) to settle a court case alleging some of its devices were listening to people without their permission.

The tech giant was accused of eavesdropping on its customers through its virtual assistant Siri.

I remember testing this about 5 years ago to prove it to my wife as she was skeptical - I kept adding into our conversatons that we should got to Disneyland (I warned her I would do this as a test as it is somewhere we have no interest in going to) and sure enough we started to get adverts appearing after a week about the park.

I suspect the other big players (Microsoft, Google etc) are also up to this but are much better at hiding it or have added wording in their Terms and Conditions to allow it.

It is more than a little concerning.

Parents

  • I turned off the internet on my phone and made it dumb, so it can't eavesdrop on me.

    However, I have a Kindle tablet with Alexa and although I tried to disable her, I think she is spying on me....

    (Maybe soon she'll start singing Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do?)

Reply

  • I turned off the internet on my phone and made it dumb, so it can't eavesdrop on me.

    However, I have a Kindle tablet with Alexa and although I tried to disable her, I think she is spying on me....

    (Maybe soon she'll start singing Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do?)

Children
  • in reply to Lotus

    I think my Alexa listens to me when I don't ask her to. I've put an eye mask over the screen, as I don't trust the screen not to spy, despite the slide button. Paranoia possibly, but hey ho. 

  • in reply to Lotus

    I’d never get an Alexa as I don’t see the point of it - the only reason I got a smartphone was for the vaccine passports that the Irish government were insisting on, as I was desperate to visit my family in Ireland during Covid from the U.K., even though I have always held and renewed an Irish passport (with increasing difficulty during and after Brexit) in the 24 years I’ve lived in the U.K. - I was doing a course online and most stuff like paying bills are online based, as well as contacting family in Ireland via Zoom, which was the only reason I got this iPad Pro as my main internet device, ordered online during Covid lockdown