Is Siri spying on me? Apps on my iPad began playing Spanish ads after conversations at home
Is Siri spying on me? Apps on my
iPad began playing Spanish ads after conversations at home
Jennifer Jolly Special
for USA TODAY February 2, 2020
Updated: This story has been updated to
reflect comments from Apple after publication.
I watch most TV shows and movies on my iPad
these days, and something strange happened recently. My iPad – or rather apps
such as Hulu and Bravo linked via Apple TV on my iPad – started showing me
commercials in Spanish.
That was interesting, since I hadn’t touched
the language settings, watched any shows in Spanish, or done any kind of
internet activity in another language. But even more curious, was what had
changed when the new commercials popped up.
We had just moved to a more Spanish-speaking
area of Oakland, California. While I don’t speak Spanish (very well at least),
my husband does and was doing so daily with contractors in our new house within
"earshot" of my iPad.
Could this timing and sudden sprinkling of
Spanish commercials for insurance, seatbelt safety, and affordable college
degrees be mere coincidence? Or was it a clear sign of location-based tracking?
With Siri voice-assistance active, is my gadget, or the TV apps on it,
specifically working to better predict my wants and needs – and providing
Spanish speaking commercials – to be more “helpful?”
Like so many other people who’ve mentioned a product in
conversation only to see it pop up in an ad on Facebook the
next day, I’ve long wondered if, why, and how exactly, my gadgets are
“listening,” to my life.
“It's technically possible and quite easy for
Apple and Android apps to listen to your conversations, but this being done on
a large scale hasn't been proven,” says Matthew Crowley, principal and
co-founder of Cleveland-based cybersecurity firm Cyprus Lake.
While potentially possible for rogue apps to
eavesdrop, Crowley said that’s not likely what happened in my case because
there are too many other easier ways for companies to get ad-targeting
information about us.
“A lot of applications look at your location,
track your internet surfing, credit card purchases, and might even have access
to photos and notes. Considering they can harvest words off of your pictures,
correlate other faces, and access contacts to your devices, these data brokers
can put all of this information together to create a full profile of who you
are,” Crowley added.
And Apple says it engineers its
devices to protect user privacy. When it comes to Siri, which is
integrated in nearly every Apple device, the assistant is designed to activate
only after the wake word ("Hey, Siri") or a waking action is
completed, Apple says.
So is my device actually spying on me?
“The simple answer is no, your
(gadget) is not likely actively listening to your conversations,”
Northeastern Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science David
Choffnes told me over the phone. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t (enabling
the collection of) millions of data points to know who you are, where you
live, what stores you shop at, where your kids go to school, and just about
everything else.”
Choffnes also explained that some of the most
basic tracking for advertising uses our IP address and that since I had just
moved, “maybe you got someone else’s address,” he surmised. “I don’t know that
for sure, but it’s not uncommon.”
Sure enough, when I deleted and then
reinstalled both the Bravo and Hulu apps now that we have our router all set-up
in our new home, I didn’t get any more commercials in other
languages.
I also stopped mindlessly clicking “Accept”
every time a web page asks me if it’s okay to use cookies to “personalize and
enhance my experience” on their site as a result – but this is all just the tip
of the privacy iceberg.
The ability for companies to harvest all of
this information about us, with lighting fast speed, is hard enough to wrap our
heads around. But are they really doing all of this to sell us stuff? “That’s
the billion-dollar question,” Choffnes said.
What your Android device knows
Choffnes supervised research back in 2018
that looked at 17,000 Android apps to determine whether they accessed phone
microphones without users knowing about it. While the research turned up zero
signs of audio eavesdropping, it did shed light on many other ways companies
profile us, some more alarming and intrusive than others.
“We found that every (Android) app has
the ability to record your screen and anything you type,” Choffnes said, adding
that some companies were sending screenshots and videos of user phone
activities to third parties. Northeastern researchers did not find that any
nefarious activity as a result of those screenshots, but Choffnes and others
say it underscores a much larger privacy issue: No one really knows – or can
know at this point – how many hundreds, even thousands of other little digital
data crumbs we leave all around every single day, and ultimately how all of
that information will get used.
“It’s more than to sell you things,” Crowley
said. “It’s now figuring out where you spend your money, how to get your vote,
and essentially about trying to manipulate society. The ads are a symptom of a
larger problem, and we need to do a lot more work keeping (our private
data) safe and regulating what companies can do with it.”
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer
tech columnist. Email her at jj@techish.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JenniferJolly.
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