Attention Thieves
Attention and time are today’s currency. Straight Arrow explores how technology is built to capture both, using human psychology to keep us hooked.
We’ve all had this experience. You’re having a private conversation about a specific topic, and suddenly, ads begin appearing on your devices for the very thing you were discussing.
It’s why many people are convinced that our devices are listening to us in real time, especially when an ad pops up for something we’re certain we never searched for online.
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They’re not listening — as confirmed by a 2018 study that analyzed the network traffic for thousands of Android apps and found that your audio isn’t being continuously collected or analyzed.
But the devices still know all about you: your interests, your desires, your habits, maybe even your secrets.
Advertisers don’t need access to your phone’s microphone to anticipate what might grab your attention, said Alessandro Acquisti, the Trustees Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.
“What we do on our phones — the apps we use, the searches we conduct, the links we click, the sites we visit — is collected and analyzed to infer current interests and then personalize ads,” Acquisti told Straight Arrow. “When we see an eerily relevant ad, we incorrectly attribute it to something we mentioned to a friend the previous day, forgetting how our digital behaviors made that inference possible.”
How are we tracked?
The data collected and sold to advertisers about us is vast. The cookies we receive when visiting a website can track our browsing elsewhere across the web. Our IP address can reveal our general location. Web beacons, also known as tracking pixels, are invisible images often embedded in emails that can see what we’ve clicked or read. The apps on our phone can track everywhere we’ve traveled through GPS and other means. And simply walking within range of a Wi-Fi router, regardless of whether we connect to its network, leaves a record of our presence.
Data brokers collect and combine these separate data sets en masse, allowing them to build consumer profiles on billions of people and in turn sell them to advertisers. Even the data linked to the loyalty card you use at the grocery store is fed into your profile.
Repeatedly being in the proximity of the same person can lead advertisers to infer a friendship or connection, meaning that person’s activity can also affect the ads you see.
A father searching for used cars on his home Wi-Fi network after his son mentioned only in person needing a vehicle could easily result in that son receiving ads for the very car he’d brought up.
Frequency illusion
The feeling that you’re being listened to isn’t just caused by technological tracking. There is a psychological explanation as well.
Advertisers are well aware of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion. This occurs when a person notices something more frequently — a word, an object, even an idea — after first being introduced to it.
This creates cognitive bias, causing you to remember the ad that matched your conversation, while forgetting the countless ads that feel irrelevant. Yet when an ad appears for something we recently discussed, we’re convinced it’s because our conversations were monitored. In reality, it can be a coincidence, or an inference based on a data point we were unaware we had given up.
While the results are often inconsequential, some tracking can seem especially intrusive.
In late 2024, for example, the Federal Trade Commission said the data broker Mobilewalla had sold sensitive location data without consumers’ consent — including that of women who had visited pregnancy centers. That data was sold to advertisers who targeted the women with ads appealing to expectant mothers, regardless of whether they were actually pregnant or whether they had decided to terminate their pregnancies.
Had any of those women discussed their pregnancies with a friend or family member and refrained from searching for the topic online, it’s likely they would have been convinced that their phones were listening to them when ads for pregnancy-related products began appearing.
The FTC prohibited Mobilewalla from continuing this practice.
Reclaiming privacy
So what can consumers do?
There are a handful of actions that can limit the information that’s collected from you. For starters, disabling third-party cookies in your web browsers can reduce tracking. You can also go through the apps on your phone and check their permissions. If an app doesn’t need constant access to your location, change it to only have access when using the app, or turn off location tracking altogether.
Your phone also contains what’s known as an Advertising ID, which can be regularly reset to sever the tie between your future data and your history.
And you can opt out of personalized ads, meaning that the ads you do see will not be based on your behavioral data. Browser extensions such as uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger can be used to block ads outright.
All these steps can be effective. Because even if your phone isn’t listening, it’s still tracking your every move.
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