The advertisements we see online are increasingly accurate, calibrated on our interests and on what we would like to buy, to the point of leading some people to believe that there are smartphone applications that continuously listen to conversations without their knowledge, in order to offer advertisements. more and more personalized. It is a theory that has made a certain appeal especially among those who do not trust some of the largest Internet companies such as Facebook, which in recent years has had major problems with the protection of the privacy of its users, attracting criticism and ending up in amidst scandals.
In reality, as has been shown on several occasions, Facebook and others do not need to spy on what we say, because they already have enough other resources available to track our online activities at all times. A reason that is not necessarily more reassuring, for those who are wary of this aspect of technology.
The belief of some that apps spy on conversations comes from fairly common experiences, which we have probably all experienced. Chatting in person with someone you talk about a certain product, like a pair of shoes seen somewhere, and a few minutes later you find a shoe advertisement on Instagram, Facebook or any site with advertisements. The foregone conclusion for many is that a smartphone app detected the conversation and then used that information to display the shoe ad.
Using such a system would not only violate privacy laws in many countries, but it would be difficult to develop on the technical side and expensive to maintain, if multiplied for example by the hundreds of millions of smartphones on which the Facebook application is installed. . Online advertising companies use much simpler and more accessible information to tailor ads to our interests, mostly leveraging data that we ourselves unknowingly provide to them. By now sophisticated tracking tools allow Facebook or Google to identify our interests even when we have never searched for them on social networks or search engines, using data relating to our movements, our habits, even our frequentations.
A cookie
The most widespread system, and at the basis of the operation of most of the sites, is that of cookies, the small files that the sites install at inside our browser program (browser, such as Chrome or Firefox).
To understand how cookies work, we need to go back to the dawn of the Web, when sites were much more spartan than today and had no memory of what we did on their pages. It was no small problem, especially if you wanted to buy something online, because there was no way to make a virtual shopping cart remember the products placed inside it. The server, that is the remote computer that made the site work, had no way of recognizing the same user between one request and another.
In 1994 a developer of Netscape, the most used browser company at the time, came up with a way to get around the problem. He thought the best solution was to let individual computers do most of the work to be recognized, so the servers didn't become overloaded. He then created a small file, a cookie (“cookie”) in fact, which installs itself in your browser when you visit a specific site. The cookie has a unique identification system for each user, and in this way the site can remember who is visiting it and the actions they are carrying out, such as filling the cart with some products.
The new solution changed the Web for the better, helping to transform it from a system mainly used for consultation to a place where you could join virtual communities, shop online or register for various types of services. Over time, however, the use of cookies by sites has increased enormously, with increasingly sophisticated systems to exploit information on individual users for commercial purposes.
Cookies and advertising
A large part of the sites are maintained thanks to advertising. On the one hand there are the advertisers, that is the companies that want to promote their products, on the other the publishers – such as the big platforms (for example Google and Facebook) and the site managers (like the Post) – who offer their spaces. to show advertisements, in exchange for money. In between there are intermediaries, that is the services that make this buying and selling of advertising and space on the sites possible both from a technological and an economic point of view.
Some companies have more than one role. Facebook and Google, for example, sell the spaces on their sites to advertisers and act as intermediaries, managing the systems that make online advertising work. They are among the largest companies to do this and as a result work with a huge amount of data on how users behave online, in order to personalize ads as much as possible. In general, the more personalized an advertisement, the greater its economic yield, although there are exceptions.
Third parties
Originally, however, cookies were designed to have a single contact: the site that issued them. The cookie installed in your browser by guelfi.com could interact only with guelfi.com, the one installed by ghibellini.com only with ghibellini.com and so on. At the time it seemed a safe and satisfactory solution, but it was underestimated that one day the sites would host content from other sites and that these would have the possibility to install cookies in turn on a site other than theirs. If your head is spinning, let's try an example.
The founder of guelfi.com creates a very simple site and puts it online. Some time later, he decides to add a Facebook “Like” button, so that those who follow the site can put a “Like” directly on the guelfi.com page without having to go and look for it on the social network. The code to insert the button is provided by Facebook, which manages it directly with its servers: the founder copies it and inserts it on her site. At this point on guelfi.com there is an element (the “Like” button) that to work must connect to facebook.com every time someone visits the site. In this way Facebook has obtained the possibility of saving its own cookie even if you are reading a site other than its own: what is defined as a “third-party cookie”.
The next step is more intuitive. Since the “Like” button is present on hundreds of millions of sites, Facebook has the ability to track user activities as they pass from one site to another, using its cookie. From “a cookie – a site” we have in fact moved to a situation in which cookies are exploited to follow users between different sites, collecting a huge amount of information.
The example is on Facebook, but the same principle is followed by thousands of other companies, especially for the management of advertisements. The system that we have just seen with the “Like” button works in the same way with advertisements, whose code refers to those who manage them and makes them appear on the pages. If the reference is for example google.com, it means that Google will have its own cookie and that it will be able to use it on all sites that show advertisements managed by its systems.
Tracking
We have of course simplified a little, but the basic concept is that thanks to third-party cookies and other tracking systems, the platforms are able to a pretty accurate idea of our habits, the things we like, what we might buy and the topics that interest us. Their systems are not only present on sites, but also on applications, which in turn collect much more data about us, such as our geographical location.
Technically all this information is anonymous and the platforms claim that they have no way of tracing the identities of individual users, but it has now been widely demonstrated that the large amount of data collected allows you to get a rather precise idea of the users. Together or through cookies, a large number of other information is collected, including details on the WiFi network from which you are connecting, the type of device and the version of the browser and operating system you are using.
It is the combination of this information that ensures that after visiting a site to buy a pair of shoes, we find ourselves advertising the same shoes elsewhere, in advertisements displayed on a social network or on other sites. It may happen that in some circumstances the tracking systems do not work as expected, or that they are set up to do things a little differently, and this brings us back to the question of apps that would spy on our conversations.
Listened to?
Some people feel they are being listened to because they find themselves advertisements for products or services they've recently talked to someone about. In most cases, those advertisements are trivially the result of preferences and activities carried out over time online, and perhaps to which not much attention was paid. It is likely that, if we talk about a pair of shoes with someone, we had seen that model somewhere online, perhaps between an advertisement and an Instagram post: and that we had clicked on it or stopped to read its description and details. Activities of this type may be sufficient to ensure that a potential interest in that product is captured, triggering systems to re-propose it after some time through advertisements on other sites.
In some cases we see an advertisement for a product that we are sure we have never searched online before, but which had been the focus of a recent conversation with another person. Again, it is likely that the advertisement is shown not because an application was spying on the chat, but because our interlocutor had seen that product on a site. Through the tracking it is in fact possible to deduce that two users were in the same place, perhaps due to the same connection used, and that they knew each other. The advertisement is shown to the other interlocutor who is not interested in the product, but who could at some point talk about it with those who had seen it online, reinforcing his interest.
Solutions like these are quite elaborate and don't always work perfectly. In some cases, for example, you see advertisements for others simply because you are using their own connection and have particular settings in your browser. The functioning of the human brain means that, among dozens of product advertisements that we have never searched online, we notice the one relating to the object we talked about in the previous days: which could therefore easily be the only one right on many attempts other than part of Facebook.
The tools to track online activities are not lacking and do not make it necessary to resort to spying systems such as listening to conversations in secret.
Counter evidence
A study conducted about three years ago at Northeastern University (Boston, United States) considered thousands of applications for Android smartphones, many of which equipped with systems to send information to Facebook. The study proved that none of the applications, including that of the social network itself, had secretly used the microphone of smartphones.
Facebook has on several occasions denied listening to conversations without authorization, recalling that a constant listening to hundreds of millions of smartphones would imply an enormous collection of data, at least 30 times higher than the current one. Furthermore, if the microphone were constantly active, smartphone owners would notice a significant drop in battery power.
A possible system of this type would involve a continuous and massive exchange of data between smartphones and Facebook, which could be easily detected. Grasping the relevant parts of a conversation is not easy, as the often disappointing results of voice assistants like S. show iri and Alexa. Being able to isolate the right information from a conversation to show ads would require artificial intelligence solutions that we do not yet have, even if notable progress has been made in the sector in recent years.
Furthermore, listening through the microphone of smartphones cannot take place if there is no authorization from the operating system, which controls access to the phone's resources. Both Android and iOS (iPhone) have systems to limit the use of the microphone by applications and give the possibility to prevent its use.
The most recent version of iOS (14) shows a colored dot at the top right: orange when the microphone is active and green when the camera is also active. There is no possibility for applications to use the microphone without iOS indicating its activation with this system.
To double-check ads based on spied conversations, you can disable Facebook's microphone access.
iOS
On iOS, go to “Settings” then scroll through the list of installed apps until you select “Facebook”. In the next menu just tap “Microphone” to turn it off. If you have never given permission within the application to use it, “Microphone” will not even be shown in the list.
Android
On Android, go to “Settings” then search for “Authorization manager”, then “Microphone” and from the list of applications that appears, choose “Facebook”. In the following screen you can deny the application access to the microphone.
Changing these settings will not change your activity tracking settings and you will continue to receive personalized ads, including those that appear to be inspired by conversations you have had in person. To stop tracking on Facebook, you start from here, where the options offered by the social network are included; for Google it starts from here.
In recent times, greater sensitivity towards privacy issues has prompted some large companies to review the use of tracking systems. Google, for example, is moving to a system that allows you to show personalized ads, but with less invasive systems, albeit equally criticized. Facebook, which bases its revenues almost entirely on advertising, has taken a more cautious approach to turning things around and has criticized Apple for its recent move to make tracking within every app on iPhones and iPads optional. The changes to advertising policies are a conversation that the social network for now prefers not to hear.
