![]() ![]() Beyond technology, he's also professionally written on agriculture business for Ozarks Farm & Neighbor, edited proposals for non-profits, and presented at a writer's conference on superheroes and culture. Prior to getting started at How-To Geek, Jordan published articles for MakeUseOf about Linux commands, free and open-source software, and online privacy. He's repaired his own smartphones, hosted home cloud servers, and revived old computers with Linux. As a kid, he learned object scripting through the MS-DOS game engine ZZT, and he later taught himself the basics of Python programming. Jordan started writing technology guides in 2020, but his technology and writing experience extends far and wide. Even disabling GPS tracking doesn't help like you'd think because other data points like nearby Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals make geolocation tracking difficult to stop. You can try getting a reasonable amount of anonymity by browsing with Tor, but that comes with its own drawbacks and pitfalls. Your behavior itself can be fingerprinted, cataloged, and tracked across browsing sessions, weakening many privacy tools. Using a VPN in combination with private browsing mode can also make your browsing activity harder for advertisers to track. You can minimize the amount of data being collected and shared with changes like tweaking your Google account's privacy settings or switching to privacy-centered alternatives to popular services like DuckDuckGo for search and Signal for messaging. ![]() Your smartphone is a little sponge soaking up every bit of valuable data it can, and anyone asking for that data generally can have it. So if muffling your phone's microphone closed won't actually get you any real privacy, what can you do to stop those suspiciously relevant ads from appearing? Unfortunately, not much. But you know what doesn't lie? Your browsing history. Who hasn't faked interest in a friend's boring hobby out of politeness? Any secret eavesdropping lab would quickly have to shut its doors thanks to that low-quality, inaccurate data. On top of that, people lie and mislead about their interests in conversation all the time. That movie you saw last week and liked so much you told your coworkers about it? Google probably guessed you were going to see it before you decided to and may have known you enjoyed it by the way you interacted with your phone during and after the showing. Your hot takes and new obsessions are old news for companies like Google. Whatever you're talking about right now, ad-serving software probably knew you and your friends were interested in a long time ago. Why? Because, at the end of the day, for advertisers at least, your chats with friends and family aren't even worth listening to. The problem is that the entire project would be a tremendous waste of time and energy. Okay, let's say big tech companies with their vast resources were hiding a huge underground lab where everyone's real-life conversations were being stored and analyzed for ad targeting. Your Conversations Aren't Really That Valuable It's just not feasible, not even for Google. Imagine the resources it would take to transfer, store, and process the audio from every smartphone mic at the same time all day long. Some advanced kinds of spyware might behave like that, but the difficulty and costs of infecting a phone mean you'd need some seriously powerful enemies to have cause for concern.Īnother problem is the simple fact that, in terms of bytes, a decent-quality voice recording is gigantic when compared to data points like your most recent search and location history, which are much more compact. But all of that work would put a huge strain on your phone's resources, draining your battery and likely driving your data usage through the roof. ![]() Yes, it is technically possible for software on your phone to record audio and upload it to a remote location at the same time. ![]() Related: 5 Ways to See If Your Phone Is Being Tapped In fact, what ad companies do is far more efficient than snooping on your in-person conversations. Promoting ads that coincide with what you're thinking and talking about is really that simple, but it's also just plain efficient. Recording Conversations Is Completely Impractical ![]()
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