Yes, Your Phone is Listening to You

If you Google things as much as any human with a smartphone does in today’s age, you have probably had the feeling that Google’s predictive search feature works too well.

Google is able to predict (sometimes with very creepy accuracy) what you will search for. I can recall a conversation with a student where she was telling me that after a conversation offline about their bedroom furnitures with her husband, the next online search she performed was full of autocomplete options related to bedroom furnitures.

Google and other big data companies like Facebook already know so much about us that they probably don’t need to eavesdrop on us to predict what we might need in the next few hours, days, weeks and years.

There is already a ton of content and research performed out there with evidence that goes into details how that works technically, and detail a myriad of ways that information is used. My goal with this article was just to share my experience. And to be clear, yes, your phone is listening to you.