“Is it true that my phone is listening to me?”

(Answer requested by Jason Zimmer)

Yup, almost surely, especially if you have any voice-enabled assistant or controls installed and enabled. Those services and features are designed to at least minimally listen all the time so that they can hear and can respond whenever you happen to say “Siri/Google/Bixby/Alexa/Cortana/whatever” or whatever trigger phrase your assistant uses.

Less-obvious apps may be listening too, including any app to which you’ve given microphone access: If it’s running in the background, it could be listening. (Facebook’s app is often accused of this; there are many anecdotal reports of people conversing about a product near (not on) their phone, and Facebook later magically showing them multiple ads for that exact class of product.)

The only way to completely avoid this is draconian — remove all mic access from all apps, and hope that your software vendors don’t try to weasel around your settings.

Barring that, all you can do is be very selective about which apps have mic (and camera!) access. If an app has no obvious reason for requesting invasive permissions, it’s a bad app: Ditch it!

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