Why does my phone listen to what I search for?

MarkG13

Hello, apologies as I know this probably doesn’t belong on this forum, but if anyone has any thoughts or advice I’d be really grateful.

For a long time now my wife has been saying that our phones are “listening to us” and sending adverts and so on. But the weird thing I have is that she gets sent stuff to her phone that I have been searching for. How does this happen? Is there anything I can do to stop it please?

AgentY

MarkG13 This probably happens because you use the same home network and some advertisers will push personalized adds not only to your device, but to the whole network. The same happens to me and my family from time to time, it’s nothing special. And also speaking of phones listening to us, I observed that people tend to sometimes look for something in the internet then forget about it and then they get advertising for this thing and will think that phone was listening to them.

ItzHunter

It’s more common than you think, and i believe it’s on most of the privacy terms in the apps you got on your devices, companies get revenue from that, online stores show you the item you’ve been talking about and you get an easier way to get it, win-win. if it really concerns you… well, i don’t think there’s a way to disable it but get used to it.

MarkG13

AgentY Thank you for your reply, I didn’t realise about the network thing, but the other thing is I don’t get stuff sent to me that my wife looks for. But anyway I’ve also followed another tip and turned off Google Assistant and a couple of related settings so I’ll see if it helps 😊