Is my phone listening to me for ads?

Not in the way the question usually means. No company has shown that a phone secretly listens to ordinary conversation and passes what it hears to advertisers. The cases that come up most often fall into three groups, and each has a different answer. The first was a false claim. The second is disclosed and limited. The third is real, but it is an accident, not a feature.

The "listening for ads" claim was false, the FTC says

The FTC charged Cox Media Group with falsely claiming to offer "active listening" ad targeting to small businesses. Cox agreed to pay $880,000 to settle the charges ¹. The FTC also said the service did not listen to consumers' conversations or use voice data at all ². A settlement is not a court ruling, but the FTC's position is that the pitch was not true.

Meta announced that it would use AI chats to personalize ads

Meta announced in October 2025 that it would "soon use your interactions with AI at Meta to personalize the content and ads you see" ³. It is the most direct case we found, and it is disclosed. It is also about what you choose to say to an assistant, not about what your phone hears when you are not using one.

On the microphone itself, Meta says it does not use the microphone unless you have given permission and are actively using a feature that needs it ⁴. We could not find Meta's current privacy page or any 2026 update, so check it before you rely on the 2025 wording.

Apple takes a different position on Siri. It says Siri transcripts and related request data "are not used to build a marketing profile, and are never sold to anyone" ⁵. That is a policy statement, and it is not an audit.

Accidental wake-ups are real, and they can record speech

The third group is the one that matters most. A voice assistant can wake on a sound that is not its wake word. In a 2020 study of smart speakers, the authors found no evidence that the devices constantly record conversations, but they did find that the devices wake up frequently, usually for short intervals ⁶. A wake-up that you did not intend can capture the words that follow it. Google says Gemini apps wait in standby until activated, and that audio recordings may begin a few seconds before activation ⁷. A recording can therefore start by accident.

The study played TV shows to the speakers, so a real room with people talking may give different numbers. Our answer on how often voice assistants wake by accident covers the rates in detail.

What the evidence does not show

The sources do not show that phones record in the background for advertising, and they do not show how many people have been affected by the Meta change, since it was new when we checked. The study does not test phones, and it does not test a phone in your pocket. Your own device may behave differently from the speakers tested.

Two things would change the answer. One is a company that begins using ambient audio, which would appear in its privacy policy or in an update to its terms. The other is a documented case in which a company was caught doing it. Neither is in the sources we checked.

What to do

1. Review which apps can use the microphone in your phone's settings, and turn off any you do not need.
2. Read the assistant's privacy page, and find the setting that controls whether your audio is kept or used for product improvement. Our guide to human review of voice recordings lists what each major company says.
3. If you use Meta's apps, open the Ads Preferences tools that Meta's announcement names, and adjust the ads you see at any time ( Meta's announcement).
4. For dictation, use a tool that processes speech on your device. Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows. For background on the difference, read our general overview of online speech recognition.

For the related questions, see whether Apple contractors listened to Siri recordings and what the Google Assistant recording lawsuit was about.

For the full subject, see our overview of voice privacy.