Phones listen to the conversations of the owners: is this really so

Cellular Security Wandera has decided to conduct its own investigation to see if there is evidence of a widespread belief that our conversations are eavesdropping.

Фото: Depositphotos

In fact, the Internet is full of user reports about allegedly irrefutable evidence that companies like Facebook and Google are spying on them to deliver targeted ads.

In recent months, videos have gotten a lot of views, in which people discuss certain products, and then ads for these products appear on their devices.

Wandera cybersecurity experts have repeated a number of such experiments on the Internet and have not found any evidence that mobile devices or applications have been secretly tapped.

Two-room experiment

The researchers placed two phones—a Samsung and an iPhone—in an “audio room” that played commercials for cat and dog food for 30 minutes. Two identical telephones were left in a soundproofed room.

All phones had active social media applications Facebook and Instagram, as well as Chrome, SnapChat, YouTube and Amazon with all possible options.

After that, the researchers checked the availability of animal food advertisements on each of the platforms and web pages. They also analyzed the battery consumption and the amount of downloaded information on the phones during the experiment.

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The experiment was repeated at the same time for three days, and no pet food advertisements appeared on the phones in the audio room, nor did they experience increased battery consumption or additional data downloads.

Phone activity in the "audio room" and the soundproof room was identical.

In fact, there was some data transfer from mobile devices, but its activity did not approach the data transfer volumes when using virtual assistants such as Siri or Google Hey.

“This means that speech was not recorded and uploaded to the cloud server by any of the applications,” said Wandera systems engineer James Mack. “If this happened, the data load would be as high as using virtual assistants.”

Unsubstantiated suspicions

For many years, telecommunications giants have fought off charges of spying on us with the help of microphones built into our mobile devices.

Last year, Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg was asked this question at a hearing in the US Senate, and he categorically denied the fact of wiretapping.

Фото: Depositphotos

However, distrust of these companies is growing, and many suspect that they are still being watched.

In tests, it was found that Android apps loaded more information in soundproof rooms, while many iOS apps were more active in audio rooms.

Analysts cannot yet say with certainty why this is happening, but they intend to clarify the issue.

Nevertheless, the co-founder and CEO of Wandera, Eldar Tavi, is confident that no secret transmission of any significant amounts of data is taking place.

“I am prepared to subscribe to the results of this study and state that we did not find any evidence of eavesdropping on the platforms tested,” he said. “This, of course, can happen in a way unknown to us, but this is unlikely.”

They already know everything about us

The results of these studies will not surprise experts in the field of information security - for many years they have seen that telecommunication giants already know so much about us that they do not need to eavesdrop on conversations to bombard targeted advertising.

The fact is that advertisers have sophisticated tools to profile users with accuracy.

Your location, site visit history and other data provide enough information to understand what you will buy.

They can connect you to your friends through social networks and figure out which of the things they are looking for may interest you.

This technology is constantly evolving and improving.

“The ads you see are the result of the enormous amount of information these companies have about you. They share this information through an advertising network run by powerful computers with self-learning algorithms, says Soteris Demetriou, an expert on mobile advertising and security at Imperial College London. “Today they can successfully predict what will interest you before you even know it.”

Of course, there are cases when some applications have been monitoring users.

In June this year, scientists from Northeastern University in Massachusetts tested 17 thousand Android mobile applications around the world.

They did not find evidence of listening, but found that some small applications sent screenshots and even short videos from users' phones to third parties. However, this was done in the interests of software developers, not advertisers.

Well, it goes without saying that cyber attacks on the mobile devices of famous politicians and other significant people with the aim of espionage are underway.

This may in Whatsapp confirmed that hackers were able through their remote application to install spyware on a number of devices.

The company said an "advanced cybercriminal" was behind the cyberattack and the threat had been eliminated.

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