If you’ve ever seen an ad for the product you were talking about a moment ago, you’re not alone. Advertisers do what they can to best match the recommended products or services to the preferences of users, although this does not mean that they are actually eavesdropping on us.
42 percent Poles believe that smartphones “read our minds”
According to the survey, 42% of of respondents in Poland have noticed at least once an advertisement for a product or service that they recently talked about or saw on TV. It is, of course, a situation when a given person did not search for information about a given thing on the web.
The vast majority of respondents displayed such ads on smartphones (75%) and computers (60%). Only 16 percent saw them on the tablet. Interestingly, 27 percent of respondents have never seen such an advertisement, and 31 percent. can’t remember ever having experienced this. More than half – 56.5 percent. – of all respondents also do not know whether they can in any way “limit the smartphone’s eavesdropping privileges” – writes NordVPN.
How is this possible? It’s not magic, it’s new technology
How is it possible that smartphones seem to read our minds? In the vast majority of cases, the so-called Cross-device tracking, i.e. many technologies that connect many devices used by one person.
It often happens that we did not read about a given product on a smartphone, but we did it on a laptop, desktop computer, tablet or asked a virtual assistant about something and we do not remember about it ourselves. We are usually logged into the same accounts on many devices, which means that ads selected based on the search history, e.g. on a computer, may be displayed on a smartphone.
A slightly more controversial practice, however, is Cross-device tracking using ultrasound. These are sound waves with a frequency too high to be heard by humans. These sounds are sometimes emitted by some applications and may be picked up by other devices. This means that advertisers can use even unrelated devices to create a single user profile.
As NordVPN also describes, advertisements containing ultrasound can also be broadcast on TV (although we are not aware of this). The signals are then captured, for example, by a telephone, which in turn can display advertisements for products that we previously (even subconsciously) remembered from television.
To protect yourself against this type of practice, it is best to review (and change) the permissions we have granted to specific applications. Many applications do not need, for example, speakers and a microphone to work, but after installation they ask for access to these components.
Source: Gazeta
Mabel is a talented author and journalist with a passion for all things technology. As an experienced writer for the 247 News Agency, she has established a reputation for her in-depth reporting and expert analysis on the latest developments in the tech industry.
