---
title: "Your Phone Isn’t Spying on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/your-phone-isn-t-spying-on-you-to-show-you-ads-it-s-worse-than-that--ginidr37n
source_url: https://lifehacker.com/what-people-are-getting-wrong-this-week-phone-surveill-1850658089
type: article
source: "Hacker News"
published: 2024-02-05T18:11:35.692Z
updated: 2024-05-09T08:22:04.995Z
tags: ["data-science", "privacy"]
reading_time: 6
upvotes: 36
comments: 3
language: en
---

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# Your Phone Isn’t Spying on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)

**[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 6 min read · 36 upvotes · 3 comments

## Summary

Your phone is not listening to you to show you ads, but it is collecting data such as location information, search history, browsing history, purchase history, and physical interactions. Advertisers use this data to target ads based on your interests and the people you spend time with. While targeted advertising can seem accurate and sometimes mysterious, it is based on algorithms and large datasets. The next step in advertising is generative AI, which could create personalized ads that target your insecurities and dreams. However, there are tools available to help protect your privacy online, such as Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature and privacy controls on operating systems and browsers.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://lifehacker.com/what-people-are-getting-wrong-this-week-phone-surveill-1850658089>

## Community discussion

Top comments from developers on daily.dev.

**@thomashighbaugh** · 0 upvotes

> Tools to keep people from targeting me with ads... Apple is the last company I would trust.
>
> But selling me crap I don't need is not the real concern. It is when the government decides to ratchet up to a police state with that specific data there would be nowhere to hide.

**@ghost** · 0 upvotes

> Maybe I'm missing something, but it's been known for quite a while even by non technical people that devices collect this information for ads, so why write the title to sound like its so scary?

**@ghost** · 0 upvotes

> The beginning is true, but the end is VPN-ad-bullshit. A VPN doesn't stop tracking. For that you need an AdBlocker and more FOSS.

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---

Tags: [#data-science](https://daily.dev/tags/data-science), [#privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/privacy)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/your-phone-isn-t-spying-on-you-to-show-you-ads-it-s-worse-than-that--ginidr37n)