Have you ever talked about a specific topic (ex: Disney World) to later find ads on your phone about the exact topic? You may question yourself and say, “How is this possible?” or “How did my phone know about such and such?” Well, there may be a theory that advertisers may be spying on us using the phone microphone feature on our phones to target us with ads.

While doing research on this topic, I have found a surprising truth. According to an article I found online, it is quite possible that people are “listening”. Here is direct quote from the article, “Edward Snowden (An American Computer Professional) claimed the NSA could take over and listen to any device back in 2014.” That is honestly scary because technology has gotten way better since then.

Though, most companies like Facebook, claim to use the idea of targeting advertisements (lies, just my opinion) based on what people look up on the internet (recent search history) like certain videos they see, Clothing/Goods websites, ect.

My mom and my sister are SUPER creeped about about this whole thing because they have had this happen to them on several accounts. I honestly don’t blame them for being creeped out. For example, my sister LOVES Disney and talks about it all the time. Since she talks about Disney, she usually later finds ads on her Instagram and Facebook page about Disney (like not just Disney in general, because it’s a quite popular topic, but a distinct thing that she has talked about)! Another example is from my mom. She talks about needing to get dog food for our two dogs to then find ads pop up on her phone about, you guessed it, DOG FOOD.

So, how accurate is this really though? Well, my mom doesn’t use social media because she doesn’t like it, so I think it’s kinda creepy that ads pop up about certain things she talked about. My sister idk because she probably looks on Disney’s Instagram page or something, but still!

Since I’m super curious and want to find an answer on this, I decided to get even deeper to see if this was a myth or the truth. So I then looked up a Youtube video cause I needed to see this for myself. Sadly, it is true (I’ll feature the video after the story)

So having this news, what are some way to prevent this? (I am actually going to tell you how I would prevent this)

1. Turn Siri off (if you have an iPhone) or any access to your phone’s microphone in the Settings app then go to Privacy (I think you can find it there)
2. Get “Ad Blocker” this is just for getting rid of the pesky ads and filtering the types of ads you see (Even though it doesn’t really have anything to do with getting rid of people spying on us through the microphone, it’s nice to see less ads) 🤷🏻‍♀️

Hopefully none of you guys get paranoid with this news. Honestly, this has been happening for a couple of years with some of us not knowing of the truth. I mean, who knows what else the government or businesses are using to spy on us?