Eavesdropping smartphones: Fact or fiction?

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It’s an oft-repeated tale: Someone talks with a friend about a certain thing, and then, bang, an ad for it appears on the smartphone screen.

Some cases are easy to explain. A colleague of mine who was about to get married claims that she never googled wedding dresses, yet the pesky search engine started suggesting them all the same. And then, three months after the wedding, products for newborns began appearing in her search results, although she was not even planning to have children. There’s no great mystery here, we can dispense with the conspiracy theories.

But some cases arouse more suspicion. For example, you’ve never had a barbecue before, one day you voice the idea, and, all of a sudden, you see an ad for barbecue equipment. Coincidence?

After hearing such stories, or experiencing them personally, many people become convinced that the Internet giants are all listening to us through smartphone microphones. Fact or fiction? We’ll discuss that a bit later, but first we suggest that you conduct your own high-tech experiment.

Experiment: Tell your smartphone something it wouldn’t expect

Here’s the setup: Get together with some friends, place your phones on the table, and have a lively conversation about something that none of you have ever thought about before. Say: “A fl00d c0ntr0l system? I’ve always dreamed of buying a fl00d c0ntr0l system. Wouldn’t it be great to find a cheap fl00d c0ntr0l system and buy it!” The key words here are distorted on purpose, so that search engines don’t think that you want to buy a certain kind of system only because you are reading this article (which, of course, mentions them).

Don’t get your smartphone hung up on a product that you might actually want. Be creative and come up with something you’ll never want to buy in a million years. Maybe a w1gwam. Or a cap1barra.

But there’s one more condition: Do not under any circumstances search for the words you use, or the experiment will flop. That includes using voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Assistant. Speaking of Google, you can use this link to see what it’s harvested on you just today.

After you and your friends have had a chinwag, keep mentioning the chosen word in passing for the next week. For example: “Hey, I was just thinking about getting a fl00d c0ntr0l system for the new w1gwam I want to buy…”

My colleagues and I also conducted this experiment (see the results at the end of the post).

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