Hello, who listens: do our cell phones really hear what we say?

The chronicle often offers some ideas to return to a known and debated topic, that of wiretapping. The issue does not only concern the “ears” of security agencies, cases of espionage and the actions of ill-intentioned people, but also the hypothetical abuse by web companies.

It will have happened to many that a topic that has been discussed at home or with friends then appears in the form of advertising on our smartphones. Maybe the name of a movie, the make of a car, the destination of a vacation.

Doubt that someone will listen our conversations therefore appear to make sense and the phenomenon has had a strong acceleration with the spread of digital assistants like Siri, Alexa and that of Google.

There are many theories circulating on the net that hypothesize a “Big Brother” style global listening perpetrated by the big Internet companies. Let’s just say that there is, at the moment, no evidence that this really happens. Such conduct, if it were true, would not only represent a clear violation of privacy but also a very serious crime. In such a scenario, the companies involved would risk sanctions and penalties so high that they would close their doors in a short time.

There are to corroborate this belief several independent researches such as that of the British security company Wandera or Northeasern University, but also the statements of interesting directives such as the one made some time ago in the American Senate by Mark Zuckerberg. Nobody spies on our smartphones.

Obviously until proven otherwise, the Cambridge Analytics scandal invites us to always be on the alert. However, there is a technical reason which explains why after some of our chat related advertisements appear. The big web companies, with our permission (more or less aware) know many things about us.

Every web browsing, every comment under a photo, every search made on the net, every route searched on the maps, every purchase made online generates an exceptional amount of data. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated algorithms all this data not only allow Internet companies to know what we like, but they succeed even to predict our possible future interests.

This explanation should make us rest assured but while on the big technology and web companies we can trust us with relative caution, problems and dangers could come from elsewhere. A 2017 survey conducted by the New York Times highlighted the existence of software that could potentially listen to conversations over the phone. Software used by hundreds of gaming apps.

It happens not infrequently, in fact, that when downloading an application we are asked permission to access our microphone. What happens once the authorization is granted is unfortunately not clear and it is impossible to exclude fraudulent uses. It is therefore necessary to be very careful and avoid granting this privilege especially to applications of little known companies.

It is also good to have security software of your mobile phone. Just as we protect our PC, all the more reason we should also secure the smartphone and we can do it with a rather low cost using programs such as Norton Mobile Security o Kaspersky Internet Security per Android.

With extreme excess of caution it is also possible to completely disable the use of digital assistants: Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana, etc. A drastic choice not necessary, but always possible.