Are our phones spying on us?

Thursday, August 9, 2018

A couple of days ago, I was outside with my in-laws and we were having supper. A traditional summer feast: corn and hot-dogs! My girlfriend, as she always does, started removing the corn off the cob with a knife. We started having a small converstaion about removing the corn from the cob and I asked if anyone ever saw a tool that allowed you to remove it all in one shot. We ended up saying that it probably exists and that was the end of the conversation.

Or was it...

A couple of days later, I saw this ad in my Facebook feed: 

I was in shock! Not only because when you clicked on the ad, you saw that the regular price was $250 (I'm not kidding, but it was of course 97% off... a great deal!), but also because: 

• I didn't search for corn or anything linked to that;
• I of course never seen any ads about anything corn-related before this incident;
• Even though Siri is activated on my phone, the "Listen for Hey Siri" function is not.

So I decided to do a little research on the Web to see if I'm the only one to whom something like this happened. Sadly enough, it seems alot more frequent than you'd think. After verifying my iPhone's settings (Settings... Privacy... Microphone), I've noticed that both Wish and Facebook have access to my microphone. I of course removed their access to it, but there are still applications that need to have access to it to work (e.g.: Skype, SoundHound, etc.), which means that technically, those applications can still spy on everything we say without us knowing.

We've been saying it for a while now and this only confirms it even more. Big Brother is amongst us!