People say they feel "scared" when they see ads on their smartphones about topics they just talked about

Summarize the news

Research has shown how people react to knowing that our phones are listening in on our conversations.
More than half of American respondents said they had seen such ads.
Nearly 40% of them said they felt “being followed.”
In the UK, 13% of those who saw such advertisements said they felt “scared”.

People answered a survey about advertisements generated from conversations heard by smartphones

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A series of studies revealed specific techniques companies use to listen in on our conversations and create ads based on them.

Based on this, a survey determined how smartphone owners feel when they learn about an advertisement that appears to be generated based on conversations that have not even turned into messages.

study conducted in March by NordVPNa company that operates a global virtual private network, showed that many users reacted with “fear” when they noticed such an ad.

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The research was conducted in 11 countries, and it revealed this 53% of Americans have noticed an advertisement for a product or service that they have recently talked about or seen on TV, but it did not search on any device. In the United Kingdom, this figure is as high as 45%, while Canada and Australia have results of 33% and 37%, respectively.

But the reaction of the public was different in each country, as the company has shown. Among Brits, 49% said they felt “followed” when they noticed such an ad, significantly higher than the 39% of those living in the US.

Also in the UK, 13% of respondents revealed that they feel “scared” when they see these adsUnlike the 20% of Americans who said they were “happy” with ads targeted in this way.

Ads of this type appear with so-called “cross-device tracking”, that picks up ultrasonic signals that are fed into adverts or broadcast on other equipment.

Other data from the study showed that ads of this type appear more often on smartphones (78%, on average) and about 64% of people don’t know how to change phone settings to change permissions for a potentially intrusive app.

How to avoid typing

There are several ways to reduce and avoid this monitoring. simplest It revokes the permissions of some apps. The important thing is to prevent certain apps from accessing microphone information, which in theory prohibits audio collection.

This is done relatively easily. in the device’s privacy settings.

It’s also important to be aware of when an app is using your microphone – On Android, a green icon appears in the upper-right corner of the screen; On the iPhone, the color is orange.

Another good possibility is to rent a VPN to prevent the use of IP tracking, because these VPNs use encryption to hide these logs.

Protection ensures that each device travels on its own network, preventing information from being crossed, in many cases.

Read below: Hidden dangers in mobile application terms of use

The app’s terms and conditions are often long and tedious – leading many users to authorize data collection without knowing what’s at stake. This is what Ironhack Barcelona’s director of technology school, Thiago Santos, warns

* Trained in R7 Under the direction of Pablo Marquez

According to a survey conducted by the Spanish Organization for Consumers and Users (OCU), about 9 out of 10 users do not review the privacy terms before accepting them. Of the total respondents, 3 out of 4 are not worried about this issue either – but they should be.

“By giving access to our contacts, for example, we share with this app the data of the contacts on our agenda. By allowing access to our location, we consent to the app knowing all of our movements,” he says.

Other common permissions are aimed at accessing the smartphone camera, microphone, photo gallery, appointment calendar, and the device in general. Santos warns that many of them are not necessary for the proper functioning of the app and are generally used by developers to extract information from users and direct each one of them to more personalized ads.

In 2016, the Norwegian Consumer Council conducted an experiment to find out the biggest issues with the terms and conditions of the app. To do this, the company printed out the terms and conditions of use for the 30 most popular apps and invited a group of volunteers to read them.

“They found that it would take about 32 hours to read the terms and conditions of use of the apps. Another problem is the presentation and the terminology used, which makes reading comprehension virtually impossible for lay people,” he says.

According to the expert, the clause that users should be particularly aware of is the one that gives permission for the app to sell their data to third parties, other services or associated companies. The amount of personal information that users make available and pass through the internet is very high and this has and will have consequences if they do not know how to manage it

To minimize the effects of this exposure, it is possible to choose how and when the data is shared. Most apps provide the options “Always”, “Never”, or “While using the app”

“We accept that many apps have access to personal data that we often hide or hide from people we know. The question we have to ask ourselves is ‘Does this app really need access to all this data’,” he says.