You mention a holiday to Fiji over dinner, and the next morning your feed is full of Fiji resorts. You say you need new tyres, and suddenly every second ad is for a tyre shop. It happens to almost everyone, and most people land on the same explanation: the phone must be listening.
Working in IT, I get asked “is my phone listening to me?” more than almost any other question, by colleagues, friends and family. The honest answer, based on the best evidence we have, is that your phone is almost certainly not secretly recording your conversations to sell you things. The real explanation for those spooky ads is, in some ways, more unsettling. And there is one area where devices genuinely did record things they shouldn’t have.
The short answer
The biggest study that went looking for secret audio recording didn’t find any. The most famous “proof” that phones listen, a US marketing product called Active Listening, turned out in 2026 to be a resold email list that never touched voice data. What is real is the huge amount of other data your phone and apps collect: where you go, what you search, what you buy and who you spend time with. That data is detailed enough that the ads it produces can feel like mind reading.
The biggest test: 17,260 apps
The most thorough investigation so far came from computer scientists at Northeastern University in Boston and UC Santa Barbara, published as Panoptispy at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in 2018. They scanned 17,260 Android apps that request camera or microphone access, from Google Play and three Chinese app stores. They then ran a large subset of them on real phones using an automated test program, watching the network traffic for any sign of audio being sent out. One of the researchers summed up the result for Northeastern’s news service: no audio leaks at all, and not a single app switched on the microphone.
What they found instead was arguably creepier. Some apps were capturing screenshots and screen recordings of what users were doing and sending them to third parties. In the clearest case, the delivery app GoPuff was sending video of users’ screens to an analytics company called Appsee, without telling anyone. GoPuff removed Appsee from its apps after the researchers raised it. The team was also upfront about the limits: an automated tester can’t log in to every app or use it like a real person, so it may have missed things. But it’s still the largest search for secret audio recording, and it came up empty.
The Active Listening scandal, and how it ended
If you follow tech news, you may remember what looked like a smoking gun. In December 2023, 404 Media reported that Cox Media Group (CMG), a big US TV and radio company, was advertising a service called Active Listening on its website. CMG’s own marketing promised that “CMG can now use voice data to target your advertising to the EXACT people you are looking for”, as Gizmodo quoted it. The page was deleted soon after. Then in 2024, 404 Media obtained the pitch deck, which named Facebook, Google, Amazon and Bing as CMG partners. The story went around the world as proof that phones listen.
The big tech companies quickly backed away. Google removed CMG from its Partners Program, Amazon said its ads business had never worked with CMG on the program, and Meta said it was reviewing whether CMG had broken its terms. Meta’s privacy centre has said for years that it doesn’t use your microphone for ads. But the real answer took almost two more years.
On 21 May 2026, the US Federal Trade Commission announced settlements with CMG and two smaller marketing firms, MindSift and 1010 Digital Works. According to the FTC’s complaints, the service never listened to anyone’s conversations or used voice data at all, and it didn’t even place ads in the right areas. What customers actually got was email lists bought from other data brokers and resold at a significant markup. The three firms agreed to pay a combined US$930,000, with CMG paying US$880,000. The orders were finalised on 27 August 2026 and, as this law firm analysis notes, keep all three companies under FTC oversight for 20 years.
The FTC also made a point worth remembering. The companies had told customers that people had “opted in” by accepting app terms of service. The FTC said clicking through mandatory terms is not consent to have your voice collected inside your own home, so even a working version of the service would have been illegal. In other words, the most famous proof that phones listen to sell you ads was a marketing company overselling a mailing list.
Where devices really did record people: voice assistants
That doesn’t mean voice-activated devices have a clean record. Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa do listen in a limited way: they constantly check for a wake word such as “Hey Siri”, and only start recording once they think they’ve heard it. The problem is that they sometimes mishear. The industry calls these “false accepts”.
In 2019, a whistleblower revealed that Apple was paying contractors to listen to Siri recordings, including some captured when nobody had deliberately activated it. A class action followed, and on 31 December 2024 Apple agreed to pay US$95 million to settle it while denying any wrongdoing. The court gave final approval on 16 October 2025. Some plaintiffs claimed they saw ads for things they’d only mentioned out loud, but Apple has always denied using Siri recordings for advertising, and that part was never proven.
Google faced a very similar case over Google Assistant false accepts and recordings shared with outside reviewers. In January 2026, Google agreed to pay US$68 million to settle, also without admitting wrongdoing. So accidental recording has genuinely happened, at scale, at two of the biggest tech companies in the world. Using those recordings to target ads has not been shown.
So why do the ads feel so accurate?
If an ad has ever spooked you, you’re in good company. A 2024 peer-reviewed study surveyed 886 people in the United States, the Netherlands and Poland, and found that between half and two-thirds believed eavesdropping was a likely explanation for ads that matched their offline conversations. The same researchers found in a 2025 follow-up that people who believed in eavesdropping tended to think the ad appeared very soon after the conversation. Our sense of timing is part of what convinces us.
Advertisers don’t need your voice, because they have something more useful: a detailed record of what you actually do. Here’s what’s really behind those uncanny ads.
Your location. Many apps know where you go, how long you stay and who else is there. In January 2025, hackers stole files from US location data broker Gravy Analytics. 404 Media’s analysis showed location data from thousands of everyday apps, including Candy Crush, Tinder and MyFitnessPal, had ended up with the broker. Much of it was collected through the ad auctions that run inside apps, often without the app makers knowing. Spend an hour at a tyre shop, or at a friend’s place where someone has been looking at Fiji, and that can be enough to shape your ads.
Your searches and browsing. Almost every website you visit carries tracking code from advertising networks, which build a profile of your interests across thousands of sites. You may have searched for something days ago and forgotten, or lingered on an article about it without really noticing.
The people around you. Ad systems can link devices that share the same home Wi-Fi or regularly spend time in the same places. When your partner searches for flights to Fiji on their phone, you may start seeing Fiji ads on yours, and it’s easy to assume your phone overheard the conversation.
Your shopping. Loyalty cards, online purchases and email lists are bought, sold and matched up by data firms. This isn’t only an American thing. The ACCC’s 2024 report on data brokers found Australians’ data is often collected without their genuine awareness, or used in ways they wouldn’t expect. Ironically, a resold list like this is exactly what Active Listening turned out to be.
Your own brain. Psychologists call it the frequency illusion, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: once something is on your mind, you notice it everywhere. You scroll past hundreds of ads a day and forget nearly all of them, but the one that matches yesterday’s conversation stands out and feels like proof. You never notice the thousands of times you talked about something and didn’t see an ad for it.
Put all of that together and the ads can seem to read your mind without anyone listening. Secretly recording and processing audio from billions of phones would also be a huge technical job, and very hard to hide from the security researchers who pull apps apart looking for exactly this. The evidence so far suggests the advertising industry simply doesn’t need to.
How to check what your phone is doing
You don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. Modern phones make it fairly easy to see, and control, what apps are doing. Menu names shift between versions and manufacturers, but these are the places to look.
Watch for the microphone indicator. Since iOS 14 in 2020, iPhones show an orange dot at the top of the screen whenever an app is using the microphone, and a green dot for the camera. Android 12 and later show a similar green icon. If you see one when you’re not on a call, recording or talking to an assistant, open Control Centre or swipe down to see which app it is.
Review microphone permissions. On an iPhone, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Microphone and switch off anything that doesn’t need it. On Android, look under Settings > Security & privacy > Privacy > Permission manager > Microphone. A torch app or a puzzle game has no reason to hear you.
Turn off cross-app tracking. On an iPhone, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking and turn off Allow Apps to Request to Track. On Android, look for Ads in the privacy or Google settings, where newer versions let you delete your advertising ID altogether. This will do far more to reduce “spooky” ads than worrying about the microphone.
Tighten location access. Set apps to use your location only while you’re using them, or never, and switch off precise location for anything that doesn’t need it. After the Gravy Analytics files, this is the setting I’d change first.
Manage your voice assistant. Check Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa for options to delete your voice history and stop sharing recordings to “improve” the service. If you rarely use the wake word, switch it off and start the assistant with a button instead.
Clean out old apps. Every app you no longer use is one more set of tracking code with access to your data. Deleting them is one of the easiest privacy wins there is.
Try your own test
If you want to test it yourself, pick something you’ve never searched for and have no interest in, such as a particular brand of dog food when you don’t own a dog. For a week, talk about it out loud near your phone, but never search for it, type it or look it up. Then watch your ads. It’s not a scientific experiment, but it shows the difference between what you say and what you actually do online.
The verdict
Your phone is almost certainly not recording your dinner conversations to sell you holidays. The largest search for secret audio recording found none, and the best-known claim that phones listen fell apart when US regulators found it was a resold mailing list. Voice assistants have recorded more than they should, and Apple and Google have paid a combined US$163 million over it, which is worth knowing and worth managing. But for ads that seem to read your mind, the real explanation is the mountain of other data collected about where you go, what you search and who you’re with. The good news is you have far more control over that than over any imaginary secret microphone, and ten minutes in your privacy settings is time well spent.
Sources
- Pan et al. (2018): Panoptispy – Characterizing Audio and Video Exfiltration from Android Applications, PoPETs
- Northeastern University: Is your smartphone spying on you? (2018)
- 404 Media: Here’s the pitch deck for ‘Active Listening’ ad targeting (2024)
- Gizmodo: FTC fines marketers nearly $1 million for not actually listening to people’s conversations (2026)
- FTC case record: In the Matter of 1010 Digital Works (with CMG and MindSift)
- Frankfurt Kurnit: The FTC’s Active Listening settlements (2026)
- Lowey Dannenberg: Final approval of the $95 million Siri settlement (2025)
- TechRepublic: Google’s $68 million Google Assistant settlement (2026)
- Segijn et al. (2024): Conversation-Related Advertising and Electronic Eavesdropping, Social Media + Society
- Segijn et al. (2025): “My phone must be listening!”, Big Data & Society
- 404 Media: Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal – the apps hijacked to spy on your location (2025)
- ACCC: Digital Platform Services Inquiry interim report on data brokers (2024)