boemDo our phones listen to our conversations? The answer is complicated.
I don’t know why people keep thinking that phones are listening in on every conversation just so they can advertise ‘Volvo’ at you.
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they don’t need to - we give them loads of data voluntarily based on location data, what we search for, things we buy, things we ‘like’ on social media…
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they’d be stung for huge fines of caught doing it.
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it’d take enormous storage and processing power to manage all that data.
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Just think about how many things you talk about every day that you’ve never then seen an advert for (confirmation bias)
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my Google Home can’t understand me when I’m actually talking directly at it asking it a question, so the idea it can seripticiously pick out words while listening through my pocket is implausible.
Coughnsacough
Whether anyone is manually connecting to specific phones to listen in live to conversations is a very different topic. I’d say it’s a more important one then whether Google are recording everything so they can advertise things at you.
But yeah, that’s not what this article is about.