Do you think it’s possible that your smartphone spies on your conversations?
Smartphones are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives: we use them to communicate with our family or friends, check our e-mails, search for lots of things and sometimes also for entertainment and leisure with games that can be played alone or in a network with users all over the world.
However, sometimes things happen with them that set off our alarm bells at full volume. For example, many people have had conversations on the phone or sent voice memos about a topic and then that same topic is shown in ads: it could be a trip, an offer on a piece of clothing, or anything else.
That is why there are those who think that somehow a smartphone somehow spies on our conversations.
Spy smartphones: devices designed to listen in
Smartphones of the latest generations have a microphone to perform voice searches. Certainly, that has changed the way search engines operate. And it is also a factor that increases the suspicions of many people that they feel that they are somehow being heard through these devices.
The truth is that last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that this social network has access to the audios of people who record videos on their devices to post them. He assured that they have no other way to access the microphones.
However, this confession, which he completed by adding that they use these audios to make the service better, increased the doubts of many users, who even think that the microphones of their devices could actually be active all the time.
Spy Smartphone: the key in the fine print?
Every time we install an application on our smartphone, it asks for permission to access different actions. For example, you can request permission to access our camera, our geolocation or our microphone.
And why access the microphone, if the application does not need it? The developers have the answer ready: at the moment, it may not be necessary, but maybe later the application needs to access the microphone and that’s why they request the permission all at once.
And that’s precisely where the crux of the matter lies: if you’ve given an app permission to access your device’s microphone, you have no way of knowing if they’re not listening to you 24 hours a day.
Many applications use this access to record user activity for advertising purposes. That is why it is advisable that before giving permission to everything the application asks for, you read the section that says “read more”.
Nowadays, online advertising companies use the behavior of users in the networks for their purposes and it is a reality that they “listen”. There may not be enough capacity to record all conversations today, but that doesn’t mean that in the very near future things will turn out very differently.
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