Tag: facebook

Are our phones secretly listening to us?

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We’ve all experienced that moment when we talk about something and then start seeing ads for it on Facebook or other sites. Are our phones secretly listening to us?

Well, yes and no.

It’s unlikely that Big Tech spends massive amounts of bandwidth constantly monitoring and analysing the conversations of millions of people worldwide. However, and this is a big but, they do collect an enormous amount of information from our devices and how we use them—linking different apps and devices to create a very detailed profile of each user. With that data they can predict your next move or interest with surprising accuracy. They can even link the profiles of different people who share the same network—like your home Wi‑Fi—to generate an even richer picture. Or they may associate your social‑media friends’ interests with yours; for example, if several of your friends ride motorbikes, you might be shown motorbike‑related ads.

All this could make you want to turn off everything and crawl under a rock, but that would be a bit extreme.

There are a few things you can do to limit the information collected about you:

  • Review the ad‑personalisation settings.
  • Disable microphone access for apps that don’t need it (just in case).
  • Turn off location history.
  • Use privacy‑focused browsers or search engines (no Chrome or Google!).
  • Avoid third‑party cookies and clear them regularly.
  • Limit logging into websites with external providers (e.g., “Log in with Google” or “Log in with Facebook”).
  • Use a VPN.

None of these measures will make you completely anonymous, but they can help reduce tracking.

Speaking of anonymity: the “browse anonymously” option offered by some browsers does NOT keep your browsing secret. It merely prevents others who use the same computer from seeing your cookies and browsing history; it doesn’t hide your activity from the sites you visit or from network observers.

Facebook problems

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“My Facebook has been hacked!” Well, probably not. It most likely has been cloned. In
other words, no-one found your Facebook password, but what they did is create a new
Facebook profile with your name and photos on it. And then they send friend requests to
your friends to eventually hit them for money.


The best way to avoid this, is to lock down your profile and make everything only visible to
your friends (and only accepting friend requests from people you know personally and are
not already friends with). Sadly, there are a number of places where you have to do this in
your settings, and it is easiest on a computer, but can also be done on a phone. So click on
your profile picture, select “Settings and Privacy” and then “Privacy”. Now under “Your
Activity”, “How people find and contact you” and “How you get message requests” change
everything to Friends, especially ‘Who can see your friends list’ and ‘Who can see your
future posts’, you can also change the audience for past posts to Friends.
Now go to Profile and Tagging and again change everything to friends and turn on
reviewing.
Now go back to your profile page and check what you have written under ‘About’ – this is
always public so make sure you do not give away to much about yourself. Especially under
Contact and basic info I would lock down your birth date.
Your profile pictures are always public, so make sure you don’t have a photo of your
address or other details.
All this will not make you totally secure, but it will make your profile less interesting to bad
actors.

Since this article was written, Facebook has actually made it a bit easier and collected most of these settings in an area called privacy review or similar (they tend to change things occasionally), which is still accessible through settings as described above.