CSA Online by Andrew Moore-Crispin Our Phones (and Other Devices) Have Eyes No. Our devices aren’t spying on us with their cameras, either. We give them more than enough information already. Smart devices track our online activities, including the websites we visit, the apps we use and the searches we perform. These include voice searches, but only insofar as we’ve opted in by saying “Siri,” “Alexa,” “Hey Google,” etc. to wake the device up. All of these data are then combined with location data, device information, demographic details, buying habits, preferences and so much more to create a comprehensive profile of each user. For example, Facebook’s data policy states that they collect information about a user’s “actions, connections and information from third-party partners and others.” They even track user activity outside of Facebook through the use of cookies and pixels embedded on websites. This means that, even when you’re not using Facebook, the company is still gathering data about you. This isn’t personal data such as banking information. And this is not intended to be alarmist. There’s certainly an upside to more personalized search results and interest-based ads that are actually relevant. Whether it’s worth it or not depends entirely upon your perspective. The fact is that tech companies rely on us not to think about it too much. There is some government oversight regarding how and how much data can be gathered about us – the General Data Protection Regulation (GDRP) enacted by the European Union is probably the best, but certainly not a perfect example. Its impact extends beyond Europe. In North America, the individual protections are less definitive. This is not to say that companies don’t fall afoul of rules and regulations. Or even just go a step too far in the eyes of the people whom they’re effectively monitoring. Remember when it came out that the seemingly innocuous Tim Hortons app was tracking way more than how we take our coffee? From the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in June 2022: “People who downloaded the Tim Hortons app had their movements tracked and recorded every few minutes of every day, even when their app was not open, in violation of Canadian privacy laws, a joint investigation by federal and provincial privacy authorities has found.” Apple gives users the option to opt out of app tracking (which would have stopped Tim Hortons in its misstep) and others are starting to follow suit. Google is phasing out “third-party cookies” –these are trackers that users unknowingly encounter in their web travels which are used to target ads, as in the Facebook example above. So all of these data are being collected… what happens next is the right question to ask. By Andrew Moore-Crispin Is My Phone Listening to My Conversations? It’s not… but the truth is stranger than fiction. The scene: you’ve been talking about something and the next thing you know, ads for that very thing are popping up on your smartphone, on Google, Facebook, Instagram… the sites you visit… and seemingly, everywhere you go on the web. It’s uncanny. The only logical conclusion seems to be that our phones are listening in without our knowledge and using what they hear to present ads for the stuff that we talk about. That’s not what’s happening but, in this case, the true story is stranger than fiction. The truth is that everything we do on our devices – phones, tablets, laptops, smart home assistants, etc. – is turned into data which are used to target us with sometimes eerily relevant ads. Surreptitious voice recording and ad targeting isn’t a thing. Frankly, it doesn’t need to be. Advertisers have access to an astonishing amount of data about individuals. That’s what leads to the uncanny ads, and advertisers seeming to know us better than we know ourselves. 42 | www.snowbirds.org
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