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Is your phone listening to your every word or watching you through the camera? How thousands of people are convinced 'coincidence' adverts are anything but
Is your smartphone listening to everything you say? We asked the experts“Smartphones are small tracking devices,” Michelle De Mooy, Acting Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Privacy & Data Project, told Digital Trends. “We may not think of them like that because they’re very personal devices — they travel with us, they sleep next to us. But they are in fact collectors of a vast amount of information including audio information.”If you doubt that, and you’re a user of Google services, take a minute and visit this link. If you’re logged into your Google account, it will show all your activity across Google’s services, from Chrome and Search to Android and YouTube. Tap Filter by date & product at the top, choose Voice & Audio, and then hit Search. If you’ve ever used voice search on Google, you’ll see a list of audio recordings that you can play back and listen to right now.Few people realize that the data is there. Google is relatively transparent, in that it allows you to review what has been collected, but it doesn’t go out of its way to publicize that it’s there in the first place. Most other companies that record you don’t let you see what they have at all, and it’s far from clear what they’re doing with the audio.Last year the CDT alerted the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to a technology called SilverPush. It uses audio beacons to track your activities across devices: Your TV emits a tone during a commercial break, a tone that’s inaudible to you, but your phone is listening for it. Now they can link the TV and phone as belonging to the same person.“When you’re using a free service, you’re paying for it with your information, but the trade-off we’re making is really unclear to most people,” says De Mooy. “The internet that I see is vastly different than the internet you see. The content we see reflects the data that has been collected on us.”