Google isn't listening to you... because it doesn't need to.

In discussing this with my friends and family, I noticed that a myth about smartphones and voice assistants has been floating around for a few years now, and it still clings firmly to people's minds.

Are Google and Apple listening to us through our smartphones?

You've surely already heard the famous line: "The other day I talked about a new lawnmower and Google started showing me lawnmower ads, without me doing any search at all!"

So: a lie, an unintentional distortion of reality, or large-scale eavesdropping?

Answer: none of that!

And yet, our smartphones can listen to us, they are physically capable of doing so, especially with voice assistants to whom we grant all permissions, so why wouldn't they do it?

Let's find out together.

Technical limitations

If the giants of the telephone industry had to save the entirety of the audio conversations from every phone on the market into their datacenters in order to run language recognition algorithms, the volume of data generated would be colossal.

But above all, the relevance of the information collected is so low that the cost of the operation would, as of today, be impossible to make profitable (for advertising purposes).

Moreover, if this data were indeed sent to remote servers, anyone would be able to see their mobile data or wifi usage skyrocket, since usable audio data would be around 1MB per minute.

1MB per minute would result in a data consumption of 1.44GB per day for a single phone.

Tests have actually been carried out to see if certain phones listen outside of voice assistants, and the answer is no.

What about local listening?

What if our phones were recording us and performing keyword detection locally? That would solve Google's storage problem while also solving the issue of consuming the user's bandwidth.

And at the same time being more "discreet."

Even though the theory is tempting, reality is more complex, running a voice recognition algorithm on a phone raises a number of limitations:

• The complete machine learning model that Google runs on its servers weighs 100GB (for the model alone).
• Battery consumption would be enormous
• Computing capacity would be sufficient to recognize precise keywords, but not complex sentences

This is actually why every voice assistant has its own fixed trigger keyword (OK Google, Alexa, Hey Siri,...) because only the mathematical detection model for that specific keyword is compiled and used locally by the phone, in order to optimize detection and avoid listening pointlessly.

Note that Google has already launched local recognition experiments for its assistant, but it only works on Pixel phones and only in English.

However, it is not these technical limitations that are behind the reason why Google doesn't listen to you through your phone, and the reason is even more insidious.

The real reason

Google doesn't need to listen to you, because you already give it all the information while browsing the web, even without realizing it.

Thanks to its pattern detection algorithms refined over dozens of years, each of your searches and actions on the internet contains a hidden meaning about you that actually reveals more about your intentions, your desires, and who you are.

"Steps to sell an apartment," "Notary fees," "How to fence a garden": with three searches a few months apart, you've given advertising companies the ability to determine that there's an 80% chance you sold your apartment to buy a house.

If you were living in an apartment, chances are you don't yet own a lawnmower... The rest follows logically.

And even more, Google will connect all the searches from people in your household through your shared IP address, so you might get targeted ads based on someone else's searches too!

You should know that it's with these same pattern detection models that Facebook can guess women's menstrual cycles as they browse the site, with 96% accuracy (even though it's rather highly intimate information).

Obviously this is just one example among many.

The message I want to convey here is that your browsing and search history actually contains much more implicit data than you think, and its relevance is far greater than your everyday conversations.

That's why Google doesn't need to listen to us, we already give it everything, without meaning to.

Conclusion

This article is absolutely not meant to tell you to blindly trust the global tech giants, or to claim that listening systems will never be put in place—that would be crazy to assert.

On the other hand, myths and legends tend to make us forget the real information that is sometimes more slyly hidden: "Your internet search is far more valuable to Google than your conversations between friends."