Your phone doesn't need to listen to you

It’s a universal modern-life experience to talk about something and immediately see an ad that seems like it must be a result of that conversation. Maybe you tell someone you’re planning a vacation and then start seeing advertisements for flights and hotels. Maybe you talk about how you want to take up running and find yourself bombarded by banners hawking sneakers. Perhaps you open up about how tough it is to be single and notice a series of sponsored posts about dating apps. When this happens, you might suspect your phone is “listening to your conversations.”

This is my favorite argument to get into over dinner with friends. In theory phones could use their microphones to record conversations. But in reality they don’t need to in order to serve up ads that are seemingly related to your very thoughts.

Via McSweeney’s.