The answer may scare you; but it is true, our phones are constantly listening to us.

I think all of us were thinking about it; while we discuss something, and then we use the internet, suddenly appears a lot of ads showing you the same information. For example, I made this question to myself, when I was talking with a friend about buying clothes for a party; then, I opened Instagram, and suddenly many “fashion ads” announcing discounts on clothes came to me. But everyone seems to have a story about their smartphone listening to them too.

Our phones constantly collect our voice data, but it is true that advertisers do not need to listen to our conversations to notice what we like; they can get information from cookies, location data, social media profile, etc. and by this way, they can publish their ads on your social websites.

The issue does not only regard on listening, because the server also spies on your likes to make a detailed analysis of your preferences; by doing this, they can send ads according to things you had liked.

Proving your device can hear you and record it, is tricky. To prove it, in 2016 cybersecurity experts Ken Munro and David Lodge from Pen Test Partners developed an app. Its aim is to record what was being said in the vicinity of a phone and display it on a monitor.

“We gave ourselves permission to use the microphone on the phone, set up a listening server on the internet, and everything that microphone heard on that phone, wherever it was in the world, came to us and we could then have sent back customized ads”, David Lodge explained.

If you do not feel comfortable with this issue, you can disable “Hey Siri” or “OK Google”, or even disable mic access for apps; this will help you to avoid ads while surfing in Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc.

For your security, we recommend you:

• While browsing, use incognito or private mode.
• Download apps from the official app stores.
• Review and limit the app’s access permission to your location or personal stuff such as photos./li>

For iPhones, go to Settings > Privacy > scroll down to a category such as Camera. There you'll find a list of apps with permission to use your camera along with toggle switches to withdraw that access.

For Android phones, go to Settings > Apps > scroll down and click on a specific app. The next screen will show you what permissions that app has and allow you to turn them on/off.