While I was visiting my older sister over the weekend, she maintained, as so many people do, that her phone listens to her and then serves up ads based on what she was just talking about.
As is typical with these cases, Big Sis claims she hadn’t been doing any searching on the particular topic, but had talked about it. Then Flash! Presto! that topic starts showing up in her ads. “What else could it be?” she asks.
Is your phone listening to you? CBS News
Tech journalist David Pogue asked 20 people whether they had ever noticed this phenomenon, and 18 of them said yes. “We were talking about coconut, and this ad popped up about coconut!” an undergrad told me. “This particular company was selling coconuts and the ad popped up. I mean, it was so random.”
So Pogue dug into this question for CBS Sunday Morning, and among the people he interviewed was Northeastern University professor David Choffnes who conducted a study to see if our phones were listening to us. Pogue emphasizes Choffnes is no apologist for the online advertising industry, noting how the apps on our phones often play fast and loose with the privacy setting we agree to (especially on Android phones).
Pogue himself also conducted a simple, non-scientific test – He put his phone on the table in front of him, talked for 10 minutes about men’s cologne, something he has never dealt with online, and had no ads for cologne show up. He goes on to note that another researcher says that phones just don’t have the capacity for that level of surveillance. “The idea of listening to every conversation around the world, and interpreting them and looking for certain words, and then matching them to the ads, is impossible” researcher Ari Paparo says. “It’s just not feasible.”
So if your phone is not listening to you to serve up ads, what is it doing?
- Your phone’s operating system (Android or iOS) does listen for its digital assistant trigger words such as Hey Siri or OK Google which tell it you are asking the assistant a question. And once in a while those services will be accidentally triggered. But individual apps are not allowed to listen to you – they are blocked by your phone maker. Nelson Aguilar, writing for CNET in 2025, also notes that covert listening to you by your phone would violate the federal Wiretap Act.
- The apps on your phone do pay attention to your demographics, everything you search for, everything you share on social media, and where you are throughout the day. They also pay attention to every ad that’s been served up to you.
- The actual answer may be more sinister – your phone and its apps already know so much about you there is no need for it to listen to you. They know an incredible amount about you, including your spending habits, travel habits, viewing habits, etc. Joanna Stern, writing for the Wall Street Journal back in 2019, found with a review of 80 different iPhone apps that all but one had multiple trackers operating within them.
- Given how many ads we are exposed to in a day, which can be as many as 10,000, we cannot possibly notice them all. So the ads we pay attention to are the ones the feature what we have been just talking about. So in other words, we are choosing to attend to ads that are relevant to what we’ve just been talking about. So the conversation triggers us, not our phones.
So, in the end, your phone doesn’t listen to you to serve up ads because it would be too difficult and it doesn’t need to. Which is not really comforting.