I bet Google knows more about me than myself.

The day you buy your first mobile phone, you give up your privacy.

People in the 60's : I better not say that or the government might wiretap my house. People Today: hey Wiretap! Do you have recipe for Pancakes?

Pretty sure Snowdon exposed how NSA can turn on phones mics n anything whenever they want .. not just "bugs" in software

I met my uncle and his family after years last month, we were all sitting and talking and in between they'd talk among themselves in German. That night I started getting UKposts ads in German, and on a few other apps as well. So we might feel a little violated and find it crazy but it's really no surprise.

Google should have a match making app.

If google would know what i'm watching in the web they would stay away from me

When you order a pizza Google knows your wife is on strike and will offer you marriage counseling

Best upload in a long time. Excellent video, and Android Authorities best host.

I've had an experience where I didn't have my own phone with me, helped someone search a band on UKposts, then next day that band turns up on my feed. It's voice recognition. Doesn't matter if it's your phone or not. People I worked with who were on social security benefits used to call the government service on a land line to report. No passwords, all voice recognition. That was in 2017.

Another thing to note: there's a chance a random app on your phone isn't following rules and actually is listening. Apps with malware have been put on the Google Play Store so it wouldn't surprise me if some companies get away with secretive listening on a random app. Then sells that data to which Facebook and Google now have of you.

I don’t know about my phone but my robot vacuum cleaner follows me around in the house.

Security test requires more than a sniffer, but you are only a reporter. Good enough for end users to worry.

yes of course ! specially the micros which is listening all the time... as soon as the TV say something (I do not use my phone when there s ads on TV) I always have lots of ads regarding what said the TV... yes all words are in ads on different apps in my mobile phone.

Yeah, there's 7 billion people in the world and somebody has the time to hotwire the microphone in your cell phone because you're so damn interesting!

Great and very helpful video. Brilliant job mate. If would be nice to know re social media apps as to their activity when NOT used. Say they were installed and not used or running, what do they then transmit? How do they use your wifi and stored networks? In general, you could dive much deeper around such issues however you may well not have for fear of repercussions from those large entities. Keep digging!

Good one and there is a lot to add. Could be out of context but would also be exited to see studies like What our secure WiFi can tell about us form outside or Getting my home browsing patterns from my ISP office

Super interesting and important video. I would love to see a similiar one regarding the "we protect your data" company, Apple

Best way to confuse all these large companies is to allow a young family member (Child) to use your phone for a short while, and because they will choose very different things to search and games to play than you. It messes with the system and they don`t know what ads to send. Do this a few times every month and THEY will be confused most of the time.

Good info - I wish you had a link to the Gary Explains video also.

hey Gary, I have a question for you.. People are having experiences like talking face to face and then later seeing an ad about it.. what do you think about that?

Thanks a lot Garry to make everything clear.

Good video. Let's not also forget about those hidden mobile phone system apps. Even on my unlocked device using a Sprint network I have their service working in the background.

Finally this clears things up, Thank you so much gary. Very well explained.

Great episode Mr Gray , I love it and I always appreciate your episodes thank you

Gary, u r one of the most knowledgeable individuals on UKposts. I love ur reviews and info u provide. I only wish they were between 7-8 minutes instead of 15+. And I speak 5 languages fluently including "American" English by birth (and 4 European) and I still have trouble understanding ur heavy english/Scottish/Welsh accent.

Great video, thanks. I was watching TV on Saturday night and happened to glance at the black lock-screen of my pixel 2 on the seat beside me. The name of the theme tune of the programme just ending was displayed at the bottom. It would seem that something on the phone was listening to the ambient sound and sending it for analysis. I never knowingly use Google Assistant, haven't set up the voice activation, and if it gets started inadvertantly I close it immediately (or I thought I did). The Shazam app is also installed but I hadn't knowingly started that up for weeks. It was a bit disconcerting.

I just read a story on this very thing. In the news story I read it states that Yes in a way they are, but that our smartphones aren't eavesdropping on us. No instead the reason that random things you were talking about to a friend or whoever pop up on your screen is because of your past and current browsing on line. So the net will try to predict what it is that you are searching for. I DONT BUY IT. There have been dozens of times where I won't say anything about what I'm about to do online and my phone will already know. Same thing with music. I have had my phone play songs for me at random that I never searched for at all, but I'll be thinking of a song and what do ya know, more often than not it will start playing it next.

thats why put tape on the front camera of your phone.

I’d be interested in a deeper dive. Maybe adding Windows, Linux and Apple.

I dont want a phone no more, if that's the case if they actually spy on u

Actually i used more simple way by a firewall called "noroot firewall" and in order to see the connection request you have to leave all the apps unchecked, and after that i found Amazon is really taking a huge amount of requested connections.

Ok Gary I agree with everything you say about Google and what they know about me. I also agree that Huawei could care less about what I am doing with the phone they sold me. However in the case of a Chinese company if they want to know anything at all it is not what I am doing with the phone that they would won't to know it would be about the Mobile Network I am connected too that would be of interest. Therefore Wi-fi connections would be of very little concern. Mobile Network perfomance, Cell site locations, signal strength, Data speeds and cell site density are the things they would want to know in order to launch attacks if ever needed. Your test does not capture what the phone is doing on a cellular network. Think about what it would take to know if a phone is scanning a network and then shipping off that data.

Very informative gary 👏👏 thank you for letting us to know those things😊

They are listening through the S9+ One day I was speaking to my teenage son about a very specific scene in the movie Good Will Hunting -- the one in which Will (Matt Damon) first meets Sean (Robin Williams) in Sean's office. Six or seven days later that specific scene shows up in my UKposts recommendations list on my phone app. THAT'S scary

Definitely I was just talking bout this topic & this video come up in my feed so I think that confirms it 👍🏾

Any speaker, even in an old electro-mechanical telephone can be turned into a microphone. This technology has been in use since the 1950s. Modern digital technology just made this orders of magnitude easier. If you are a person of interest or use a particular phrase which will make you a person of interest, they just access all your historical phone calls and monitor everything you say, see, search and where you are at any time.

Sir, are modified third party UKposts applications ( like UKposts Vanced which provides a 100% adfree UKposts experience along with 4K playback support, swipe brightness+volume gestures and a tonne of customisations ) safe to use? It uses a separate small app called microG for account linking. So are all these safe?

Thanks Gary, for this expaining, really helpful!

You didn't mention the data that is sent to every manufacturer such as Samsung in case of a Galaxy.

I doubt xiaomi?

I've noticed when I talk to someone about a product or about a project I want to start on. I begin seeing ads based on those topics, and sometimes the exact product I mentioned. Is it coincidence? Were the ads there all this time and I just noticed it because I was talking about a power tool the day before? Or were the ads put there because I mentioned a power tool or going to Lowe's and something heard me? It's unsettling.

In the thumbnail it shows a BT Payphone, the Payphones in the UK by BT and NWP are actually very advanced and they self report faults and all usage, they are not just some old landline phone with coin mechanisms, so when someone uses them particularly in urban areas with nearby CCTV, you can really build a profile on that person and who they are calling and why. Also many of the boxes are now being used for Small cells. On top of that there's advertising and some are interactive which is targeted advertising, the public phone business in the UK is actually lucrative which is why we still have them

Yes. If I search something in google I see ads for it across ALL other unrelated apps

The animal we're really talking about when we say "spying", is obviously NOT the many random authorized or unauthorized meta-data collections that pretty much all phones do(in the background or foreground). Actual spying would naturally 1st have to be activated/enabled(by some sort of signal) in order to even begin "doing its thing", before "sniffing"(of ANY sort) was even possible. It could be virtually impossible to detect such an "intentionally" hidden/embedded "thing"(with just a pie mind you LOL or any equipment for that matter) among the MANY transparent/opaque/invisible layers in the Phones HW and/or its 99.999+% proprietary baseband FW & such. Whether or not its by design or hijacked or otherwise(aka his "unintentional"), we cant be certain, though I'd bet on designed. Meaning MOST of the Large OEM's &\or Carriers are probably "in on it", but they definitely DON'T even necessarily "have to be". Its NOT "Bugs"(though that also can/has occurred). The sense of Certainty he's leaving most people with is dysfunctional if not out right delusional imo. It's true that "THEY"'(idk the NSA and/or "nation states" etc.) probably are NOT spying on you(because you're not a suspected terrorist), But they most certainly CAN if they want to, & rather easily(quite independent of the accidental existence of a $10M "bug") at that. Info in the vid is mostly true but the subtleties between it & BS are so glossed over(if mentioned at all), perhaps hes even paid to misinform idk. & No tin foil hat is required.

I feel enlightened and relieved at once. Thank you Gary 😊👍📱

It's been doing that since the late 70 drapa and that's only the little bit that I know of analogue digital and yes there is much much more technology i can't even think of any more

The only thing this doesn't allow for is a VW style "defeat device" i.e. if the phone thinks it's being tested or likely to be tested it will not risk listening. There are many ways this could be done.

One thing I know for sure that its always looking for you location or an approximation of it even when disabling GPS. It bothers me often asking to write reviews for google maps. Didn't opt in at all.

All mobile makers left the chat.

Yes it its, it learns from what you type to help predict what you will put in next so it can help you. This was a example of something mostly benign, but it gets much more harsh, what google does with your personal info is scary, but i believe most of it is used to sell you ads such as amazon does, so if you look up a "pink dress" on amazon the next time you visit amazon you will get suggestions on other dress colors because you looked up a pink dress.... So yes, every single thing you do is recorded and watched for some reason....look at siri, i heard that she could do some 400ish things when she came out on the 5s, now its in the hundreds of thousands(or more) things she can do.

In Saudi Arabia, the software was Apple. In Saudi Arabia, the information had to be recorded at a specific time for a specific length of time. For anyone to know this information beforehand, suggest they had foreknowledge. You have to admit it's very interesting that the government was able to acquire this information that was so time specific and criminally related.

While doing a hard reset on my laptop, the set up asked me if I wanted voice recognition, then it asked me if i wanted voice recognition when device was asleep!? We also have voice recognition on other peoples phones so when you talk in private without your phone near you, the other persons phone recognises your voice and sends recommended videos etc according to what you have been speaking about via someone elses phone.

Thanks for the great explanation!

I once played a ukelele for fun, when I used my phone I got ads about guiar lessons lmao-

I have multiple dozens of examples of me and my wife talking about random stuff (wellness weekends, getting a new kitchen counter etcetc) and within the next 10-15 minutes I got relevant ads on my phone, be it Facebook or random webpages powered by google ads. I never ever had Google assistant (or any assistant for that matter) activated. All the ones that can be dactivated are completely turned off on my phone.

While this research was thorough keep in mind he wasn't able to decrypt encrypted data streams especially if the connection was protected with some sorts of certificate pinning so, most of the encrypted traffic is guesswork at this point

My friend was in a hotel once and he had some problems with another guest. It got pretty heated and my friend sent a text to his friend that he might need his gun. After sending the text the person he'd had the altercation with figured things out and squashed their beef and basically wrote it off, not giving another thought to the text he had sent. Ten minutes later the police show up to his door asking for him by name. The cops said they had intercepted his text and were just checking to make sure everything was ok and they left. The same day my friend switched phones and carriers and we still don't know what might've happened.

What do you think about the end to end encryption on WhatsApp ? I mean theoretically they shouldn't be able to look into your messages... thoughts?

First i want to say Thank you! Gary

This was defo informative and interesting. :D great vid!

People need to thank security and privacy data speculators like you👍

i use a nokia 3100 for all texts and calls, i dont have any social media accounts anymore... yes i watch youtube on a laptop specifically for watching youtube and for email. i disabled the mic and covered the camera. i do have android phones which go online for emergencies and off the net immediately after. No private data nor true information is registered to and under my true name since i have hired people to take care of everything which will violate my privacies.

This is some very helpful information!

Bing joined the chat

you need to capture gsm 3g 4g network also ;) or who know maybe there is some hidden radio also in the modem ;)

@androidathority How would you know about encrypted data?? Which you don't know how to decrypt

Excellent stuff. Thanks Gary 👍

One evening my brother and I were talking to our cousin about Facebook Marketplace. She mentioned that she's put a tonne of ads up. We said we'd never seen them ever. Later that evening both my brother and I noticed we were being bombarded with her ads in our timeline all of a sudden.

I’m going to buy a trac phone or flip phone this is sickening 🤢🤮 Most military especially marines in tech division don’t have any social media.... now you know why... they know better than to get high off their on supplies

I was talking to a co-worker one day about a product which I had never searched or considered buying and the next day I started getting ads for that product. I swear this is a true story. I KNOW they are spying on us and listening....BLATANTLY!

I recently learned that every phone has a separate battery that's connected to your phone's GPS. So your Tracking device can be turned on even if the phone is off or the battery taken out.

Sorry but I'm still a little skeptical. I was talking to a friend one day about a high end spinning top I'd bought, next day adds for beyblades showed up on my Facebook feed. Same thing happend a week or so after that with tap and die set showing up in my Facebook feed in a local buy and sell page after talking about it. can you explain that? Oh, neither were look up on the net before having these conversations either. Only discussed while my phone was on me.🤔

Years ago I informed my bff about google keeping and saving all the audio samples from using ok google, because he used it so much. From then on whenever I tried to use it in his presence he would start shouting obscene and offensive phrases.

This man is hinting hard for us to go watch Gary Explains 😂

On my Huawei Honor 8A there is a "Ride Mode" app that sent data slowly to a server in Singapore for days after first using it and I cannot stop or uninstall the app. Huawei promoted this Ride Mode in India heavily.

when is the av1 codec by aomedia going to upgrade the codec from 480p to FHD (1080p) and HD (720p) or UKposts for that matter???

Can your smartphone spy on you? NOT FROM INSIDE A SEALED METAL BOX, if not THEN YES IT CAN, DOES AND IS!! last word

Awesome video, I'm going to try this with my OnePlus and raspberry pi.

If I were going to make an ad spy, i would find way to tap into whatever on device speech digitizer was already onboard and somehow convert each sound to some type of number... it doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough. Then, from an ad network, I would try to match many of those numbers to a downloaded database of programmed numbers to match to, corresponding to common search terms. No traffic would have to leave the phone. The phone is already listening for the assistant keyword ("Hey Goo...."). And, it doesn't have to be perfect. You would get enough words triggered that you wouldn't otherwise, and it could be balanced with other factors to keep the user from being able to pin it down. The only thing that any program would need to be able to do is access some of that keyword detection and, like the video said, the communication to the ad networks is notable. Just upload some of the matches, perhaps with a confidence index, and you get those weird oddities that onkyncome from conversation, not just those from who you're associating with or where you've travelled....

Would be interesting to see the results on a Blu phone. I had one and I'm not doing that again. Within the first two weeks it started exhibiting some very strange behaviors. My lock screen kept getting changed to what I'm guessing was a Chinese lock screen--I couldn't read it. I kept finding apps installed that I hadn't installed and that the Play Store didn't show as being installed from there. I contacted Blu and after a LOT of explaining of the problem, screenshots, performing SO VERY MANY factory resets and repeatedly telling them i hasn't installed anything from any sketchy websites they finally agreed to service my phone. Most of the strange behavior stopped after that, though there was something called "Xerox service"--again, not installed by me or from the play store--that kept installing itself and eating up internal memory. I'd had the phone for not quite a year when the battery swelled up and that was it. I replaced it with a different brand and swore of Blu's phones.

*GARY!!!* *Good Evening Professor!* *Good Evening Fellow Classmates!*

Mobile carier, corporations, goverment, facebook, google microsoft already is doing that. Everyithing is calculated for benefit of others.

Gary talking about ad networks. "Bottom right, 'Ad in 3, 2, 1.'"

I haven't watched this video yet, but I can tell you, yes if your phone is turned on it is listening to anything it can hear whether you want it to or not.

Interesting how apps like “ map my run “ are able to track you down to the exact step you take w out the phone needing WiFi or a phone plan i.e. an iPod w no WiFi can still track your location

Gary's wife is angry Gary: "My name is gary please let me explain"

I notice that i can be talking to someone and what we were talking about i get ad's about that subject. It's creepy..

Every time I talk about something, I get ads about the said subject. Pretty crazy. I want a dumb phone so at least they can only track my location at that point

the phone is not spying on you, when you purchase the phone you are told that there is a camera on both sides of the phone, then you are told from birth of the two cameras in your head, the rest is up to you, but you were told, it was not hidden from you. QUALMS at least you QUALMS are straight forward.

You only tested data going across the wifi radio. What about the cellular radios? Build an IMSI catcher from an SDR and dump the data.

Very very interesting. Thanks Gary, excellent experiment.

The other day I was out in the country and didn't want to get disturbed. So I turned on "off-line" mode. Which gives you the little airplane icon and is supposed to switch off all wireless traffic. When coming back in to town I had a coffee in a local cafe. My phone started beeping to alert me I had a number of notifications. The plane was still on. Is this unwanted traffic?

I'm not so sure willingly is the correct term. Far too many apps, sites etc force you to agree or else you are denied access.

Yes. Snowden for told but the people didn't care

I've gotten a smartphone ad just before this video

The Hated One has lots of videos on surveillance, privacy, and anonymity.

I'll go one step further and say they listen even if you have your phone in airplane mode. Inside the building at work there is little to no reception so I keep my phone on airplane mode so the battery doesn't run down trying to search for a signal. There have been conversations that I only listen to and I get ads or news articles for. One very specific subject that there's no way it could have been a coincidence was someone was talking about frogs getting in their pool and getting trapped in the filter. Then I start getting Amazon ads on Facebook for these little inflatable pods that attach to the side of your pool with a bridge to let frogs jump on and climb out. VERY specific and in no way a coincidence. Another's son got a job driving a semi and I constantly got trucking news articles from Google. These are just a couple. And I remind you I was only listening to conversations and my phone was in airplane mode while also in my pants pocket. Not sure how it hears so good through that either but it does.

Rooter? That's a fornicater in Australia. We pronounce it as router (row ter).

Google gives you the option of seeing generic ads or custom ads they think are more relevant to you. I felt like that encroached on my anonymity a little too much, so I turned it off. Now every banner ad is for women's period calendar apps. Its like google is just trying to disgust me so much that I'll turn targeted ads back on to escape from period calendar land.