Vote now: Do you think your phone is secretly listening to you?

There you are, peacefully browsing the internet on your couch, when a strange ad for beard trimmers appears on your screen. Then you recall that yesterday you and your friends had a long and profound discussion on beards and wondered what the best trimmer was. Coincidence? Maybe not.

Some people believe that our phones are the perfect tracking and spying machines, with the capability to record our every word and maybe even take our photos. There are dozens and dozens of anecdotal stories, such as the one above, and even some serious accusations.

Two years ago, Google representatives were summoned by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology to answer questions about Google Assistant and the claims that it's listening even when a user has not triggered the AI by saying, Ok, Google."

The company issued a clarification stating that "Google Assistant is designed to wait in standby mode until it is activated, like when you say “Hey Google”. In standby mode, it processes short snippets of audio (a few seconds) to detect an activation. If no activation is detected, then those audio snippets won’t be sent or saved to Google."

If you ask me, I'm not sure if Google, Facebook, and the like is listening to us through our phones, but I will bet my can of beans that the US government is. It makes sense, and it probably has all the necessary backdoors, both from a pure technical standpoint and all the legal ones too.

Anyway, the question today is a simple one: do you think your phone is secretly listening to you? Vote in our poll and share your stories in the comment section below.