Last Sunday was a particularly good one. I was sitting by the window, enjoying the gentle breeze while sipping a hot cup of coffee. Engrossed in conversation, my girlfriend and I floated from one topic to another, as we often do, until we somehow got to the issue of cybersecurity.

It’s been all the rage for the past few weeks since Whatsapp announced its amended privacy policy. We spoke about it for the briefest of periods and moved on to some other topic.

But when she was scrolling through her Instagram feed just five minutes later, an advertisement for a course on cybersecurity popped up. Taken aback, she immediately showed it to me. She swore she’d never searched for cybersecurity related issues, nor had she seen this ad before.

I mumbled “Is your phone listening to us?”

I couldn’t think of any other explanation for it. And this is certainly not the first time I’d heard of such a “coincidence”. In fact, I’ve experienced it too – uttering something only to be shown an ad for it just minutes later. I’m sure you have as well.

It’s one thing to search for something and have a related ad pop up. As distasteful as it might be, we’ve come to accept it as part and parcel of the online world – a necessary annoyance that we just have to put up with.

And it makes sense. Putting up with it means reaping the benefits of Google’s powerful predictive algorithms and Amazon’s seemingly-prescient recommender systems. It means being able to see your favourite influencers’ Instagram posts as soon as they appear and Grab divining where you’d like to go the moment you open the app.

But it’s entirely something else if our private conversations are recorded without our explicit consent and sent to some marketing agency which sends a targeted ad our way.

Are our smartphones really recording our everyday conversations or are we just being unduly paranoid?

Well, Vice journalist Sam Nichols decided to find out once and for all and so, in 2018, he conducted an experiment to test this hypothesis. With his phone in hand, he uttered phrases like “I’m thinking about going back to uni” and “I need some cheap shirts for work” twice a day for five days. What he found out shocked him.

In his own words: “The changes came literally overnight. Suddenly I was being told of mid-semester courses at various universities, and how certain brands were offering cheap clothing. A private conversation with a friend about how I’d run out of data led to an ad about cheap 20 GB data plans. And although they were all good deals, the whole thing was eye-opening and utterly terrifying.”

He goes on to say: “For your smartphone to actually pay attention and record your conversation, there needs to be a trigger, such as when you say ‘Hey Siri’ or ‘Okay Google’. In the absence of these triggers, any data you provide is only processed within your own phone. This might not seem a cause for alarm, but any third party applications you have on your phone — like Facebook for example — still have access to this ‘non-triggered’ data. And whether or not they use this data is really up to them.”

And that’s the key point: the fact that our most private data – data that only we should have ownership over and access to – have been taken out of our hands and potentially placed in those of today’s tech behemoths, third party app developers or maybe even malicious actors out to profit off our ignorance of and apathy over data privacy.

But before you panic and decide to flush your phone down the toilet bowl, it is worth noting that when Northeastern University researchers tried to verify this, they couldn’t find evidence for it. They tested 17,000 apps and found no evidence of voice data being collected and relayed when voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Google and Cortana weren’t explicitly activated.

Wait! Before you start rejoicing and jump back to your bottomless Instagram feed, let’s keep in mind that such inconclusive, contradictory data only means that we need to study the matter further till we uncover the truth.

And even if we assume that our technological Big Brothers or their tools aren’t snooping on us, according to Theresa Payton, former White House chief information officer, our smartphones can still betray us as they could be infected with malware that might allow someone to remotely activate audio and video recording.

She says: “You should assume that either through a glitch, or malware or by design, you will be listened to. You could have your picture taken. You could have your video taken.”

In addition, there’s the matter of unintentionally uttering wakewords like “Alexa”, “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google” that cause our smartphones to come to life and record conversations without us realising.

Most importantly, irrespective of whether our voice data is being recorded or not, the fact that the technology to do so exists in our constant technological companions means we need to assume that we are being listened to at all times.

What a sad predicament to be in.

The George Orwell classic 1984 imagined a future world where our actions and words would be constantly monitored by Big Brother’s totalitarian government. Orwell might have missed the mark when it comes to the nature of the government of the day but he certainly was spot on about the constant surveillance we’re under – including by our own choice.

Who knows how this treasure trove of data could be subverted and used for malicious ends. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen but you certainly wouldn’t see me betting against it.

The writer can be contacted at [email protected].

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.