According to a leaked presentation by a marketing company, your phones are always listening to you!
Remember all times that you’ve talked about a brand or a product or a service with your friends, only for an ad for that product or service to pop up on your phone shortly after? The coincidence can feel unsettling, almost as if your phone is listening in.
Well, as it turns out, your phone is indeed listening to you. That’s what marketing company Cox Media Group (CMG) has claimed in a pitch deck about targeted advertising to potential clients.
In the presentation, CMG spoke about its Active Listening feature as revealed by 404Media who had previously reported about CMG’s listening capabilities in December 2023.
What is Active Listening?
Active listening technology allows smartphones to capture and analyze audio data through microphones. Unlike passive listening, which collects data from your browsing history, this taps into real time audio, including your private conversations with friends and family.
In its pitch deck, CMG had claimed that analyzing this real-time audio feed could give advertisers a deeper insight into user behaviour and preferences and would enable these companies to do hyper-targeted ads. CMG believes that by using this data, it can refine the placement of ads and boost engagement among users by predicting consumer needs and requirements with greater accuracy.
In the deck, CMG claimed that “yes, our phones are listening to us” and that “it is legal for phones and devices to listen to you and for third parties to collect that data”. It also mentioned that “we can identify buyers based on casual conversations in real time.”
In its pitch, CMG also added that they possessed an “unprecedented understanding of consumer behaviour” which enabled them to curate ads which would make people think “Wow, they must be a mind reader.”
Privacy Concerns & Backlash
This news report has created significant furore about a breach of privacy. Using microphones to capture user data without clear consent or any clear mention of how the data would be used is a clear breach of user privacy.
CMG is known for its partnership with tech giants like Meta (as a Facebook Marketing Planner), Google (as a Google partner) and Amazon (as a part of Amazon Advertising). Google has since removed CMG from its Partner Program while Meta has claimed that CMG is under review. Amazon has denied that CMG was ever its partner.
Google and Amazon have previously stated publicly that smart devices don’t engage in Active Listening beyond wake words. Wake words – like ‘Hey Siri’, ‘Okay Google’, or ‘Alexa’ – are predefined words that wake up a device and make it listen to your voice and follow instructions.
In a 2008 testimony to US Congress, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had categorically denied listening to users to generated ads. Zuckerberg had insisted that the idea was a “conspiracy theory that gets passed around that we listen to what’s going on on your microphone and use that for ads,” and had also clearly stated that “We don’t do that.”
Regulations and User Protection
It was believed up until now that instances of ‘perceived’ listening had more to do with advanced algorithms that predicted user behaviour rather than ‘active listening’ on the device. But CMG’s new technology has blurred all the lines.
This will only intensify the conversation regarding data privacy. Regulators will have to come up with stricter laws while companies will require more stringent measures to protect the user. But until then, all we can do is disable our microphone access for apps that you don’t fully trust.
The Last Word
CMG’s radical approach highlights the fine line between innovation and infringement. While targeted advertising is undoubtedly the future, transparency and trust remain paramount and only companies that keep this in mind will have long term success.
The blog post by CMG has since been deleted but an archived version of the same can be viewed here.
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