Here's How Brands Use Your Phone As A Weapon & How You Can Escape

Aaditya Jain | 9910029327 | The 15A Chronicles'Desk

Ever wondered why is that something you spoke about to your family member sitting next to you, appearing in your Google news feed, or banner ads in your Facebook the next day? A research conducted of 38,000 Indians revealed that 53% of them agreed to it. Most of the remaining did not realize it. In such a case, just look for your phone. It would definitely be lying somewhere near you. Your phone is a weapon being used by brands against you.

There are 2 culprits – Voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google, Echo), and apps that have gained the most popularity (Whatsapp, Angry birds, CamScanner, dating apps). Companies such as Google, Amazon, and Apple use their respective voice assistants to record your conversations whenever you activate them by calling out “Hey Siri”,“Ok Google”,“Hey Alexa”, and so on and so forth. It was revealed in a report that Google’s voice assistant does not even need a wakeup call to record your conversations/ambient noises. A big toothpaste brand went to the extent of recording the noise of an electric toothbrush being used by an individual, and showing him the ad of its own brand after a few hours on Facebook. Also, Apple admitted that it uses ambient voices, such as TV running in your background, to capture the type of content that you consume.

The evasive reasons that these companies put forth are – they need to improve the quality of their voice assistance for the so called “convenience” of their users, or, they need to provide better personalized ads. The truth is, they sell this information to various other third-party brands, who can, very well, misuse your info.

Similarly, apps such as Whatsapp, or those listed above, have access to your phone’s microphone, camera, contact list, call log, and photo gallery. It is these apps that record your closed-room conversations via your phone’s microphone (even when you

are not using your phone), and surprise you with a related ad in your news feed. Also, such apps, especially Whatsapp, hold the full potential of getting extremely easily hacked, with these hackers using malicious viruses to get access to your camera, and recording everything that comes in front of the camera without you realising.

Remedy? Turn off your respective voice assistants from your phone's settings. But, that is not it. Do ensure that after you have turned them off, you also turn off their access to all other apps, microphone, and camera.

Secondly, make a trade-off - Go to your phone’s settings, and turn off Whatsapp’s (and other apps’) access to your microphone and camera (yes, even if that means doing away with Whatsapp audio and video calls). This is the trade-off that you will have to make in the interest of your privacy, be it in your dressing room, or during your private in-person conversations.

In today’s world, phone is like your better half, and apps and voice assistants are its soul. To make your marriage successful, you would have to baptise your phone and purify its soul - limit the access of these apps, and completely disable the voice assistants.