Original subtitles

The smartphone, essential to our daily lives, always with us. But have you ever

stopped to wonder, do our smartphones know more about us than we know about

ourselves? Our smartphones are a spy in our pockets.

Every time you enter a store, instead of just leaving with your products, you

leave with a spy who's walking right behind you.

I'll be finding out how we're tracked wherever we go online.

Kittens!

I'm more of a dog guy. Who hasn't looked at Kitten Smash? I stopped lying.

So when an ad pops up on our phone for something we've just talked about, are

our phones listening in?

I enlist the help of the family to find out. For the luscious locks?

That's it. The curling tongs you've gone for. So we're clear with the rules.

Talk about them amongst yourselves, particularly when you're around the

phones. But please don't type that in.

Where would you look for curling tongs? Online?

I'm also going to be discovering everyday items in our homes that are

gathering information on what we do.

The one we tested a few years ago actually was tracking a precise location

250 times in just five minutes.

So it was literally going, where are you, where are you, where are you, where

are you?

And I hear what can happen when the personal information we so readily share

online get into the hands of criminals.

I felt quite sick. I was more upset for the fact that I had fallen for it, I

think, than the loss of the money.

Who do you think knows you best?

What if I told you it's not a person? What if I told you it's your phone?

Think about it. We use them to communicate, to travel with, to do

banking, to shop. We even ask it questions and expect all the right

answers. But have you ever wondered, is your smartphone spying on you?

On average, we spend up to four hours a day on our smartphones.

So how much of our information is really private? How much is being shared by

companies you've never even heard of?

And I'm not just talking about younger generations.

8 out of 10 over 65s have smartphones too.

This affects all of us.

Our smartphones are a spy in our pockets.

You might have bought your smartphone, but it doesn't really work for you. It

works for hundreds of other companies for whom it's collecting your data and

sending it throughout the day and the night.

It logs everything.

Every time you look at it...

Every place you go, every person you message, everything you search for. So

you might not remember where you were a week ago and who you talked with, but

your phone does.

Meet the Trussells. They don't see a big problem with any of this, even though as

a busy working family, they're increasingly reliant on their

smartphones. Dad Stephen is a personal trainer.

Lucy is a busy working mum. And then there's 19-year-old Billy and the twins,

Alfie and Louie.

Thanks for letting me in. I just want to find out a little bit about you guys and

how you use your tech.

So I'm assuming you guys are glued to your phones.

Sometimes.

Sometimes. What?

apps do you have on your smartphone what do you use most often uh most probably

ticked up tick tock instagram snapchat louis the same snapchat instagram tick

tock amazon music oh pinterest pinterest yeah that's quite sort of a posh

instagram isn't it lucy asos zara okay i see where you're dressed as well and

facebook On average, smartphone users like the Trussells have up to 20

different apps running on their phones, each one collecting personal

information. Steve, what about you? What would be your top five most used apps,

would you say?

Definitely Facebook, Instagram.

I'm more Facebook than Instagram just because... But you use it for your work

as well? Yeah, yeah. So here's a question then. Do you guys think your

smartphones are spying on you? Are they listening in?

No? No? I think so.

Yes? 50-50. On the fence.

So if I was to come to you and say, can you just give me all your search

history, tell me all your friends, can I see all your chats as well and

everything you've looked at and bought and everything you've talked about with

your mates, would you share that with me? No.

Well, why not?

You're sharing it with your smartphone.

Privacy concerns at all?

No. I don't think we've got anything interesting to say.

A lot of people think that they're no one special, but if you were no one

special and you had nothing to hide, then all of these companies wouldn't be

making such a big effort to get to your data.

So how are our smartphones able to scoop up information about our private lives?

To find out, I'm meeting up with an expert in cybersecurity.

Big question.

Is my smartphone spying on me? Is it spying on you?

Yes. What they're after doing is finding out from you, by your activity on the

phone, what you're doing. And how does that work? So how is this smartphone

tracking me right now?

So it knows where you've been. Yeah. It knows where you've searched.

It knows what you've looked for.

And it packages that information up and that'll be resold to advertising

brokers. Does it know...

who I'm with.

Because this is something quite interesting.

I'm sitting here, you've got your phone in your pocket.

Do our phones right now, we're having this conversation, do they know that

we're together?

So here's the thing. The trackers know that our phones are in proximity.

You've let your phone track you. You've let advertising trackers track your GPS

coordinates. Is that why you think that that's a sort of a...

It's a form of spying because I've not given permission to anyone to know that

you and I are meeting today to do this bit of filming. That's not information

that I've made readily available, but somewhere someone knows about it. It's

quite creepy, isn't it? Yeah, it is.

So if location trackers in our smartphones give away where we are, is

it possible that they're also secretly listening into our conversations?

Billion-dollar tech companies like Google, Apple, Meta and TikTok insist

they don't target us with adverts by listening in to what we say.

But try telling that to smartphone users in the UK.

More than half simply don't believe them.

So who's right? With the help of the Trussell family, I decided to test out

if smartphones are secretly listening in.

Lots of people have said, oh.

I was talking with a friend, and we were talking about trampolines, never even

searched for it, didn't put it in my phone. Next thing I know, on my

Instagram feed, big advert for a trampoline. How is that possible unless

these companies are listening in to those phones right now?

I've brought in some subjects here, and here's the deal. Everybody picks a

subject. I want you to talk about that subject as much as you can.

particularly when you're around your phones.

Keep mentioning the words, mention whatever it is that you've picked.

But there is one hard and fast rule.

Do not type that subject into any device.

Never type it in for the next couple of weeks.

And let's see what happens. Because the theory should be, if you don't type it

in and you just talk about it, it shouldn't really come up on your phone.

We'll save one familiar as well who's not here, but I'll put the topics, there

we go. So who wants to pick what?

Go ahead.

Okay, and we'll leave Millie with... I think we've allocated her basketball.

So, you've got vacuum cleaner.

Yep. Do you know what that is?

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Right, vacuum cleaner. Yep.

Disneyland Paris.

You ever been?

No. Would you like to go?

Yeah. Maybe you'll get an ad to go.

Digital watch, Lucy.

Yeah. Have you got one? No. Would you like one?

No.

And...

For the luscious locks, curling tongs you've gone for. Right, so we're clear

with the rules.

Talk about them, talk about them amongst yourselves, particularly when you're

around the phones.

But please don't type that in to anything.

And then we'll see how you get on. Okay.

Good.

Coming up, I'll be showing you how your smartphone finds out everything about

you. Football? 100%. 100%. Here, we're going to put football just here.

And how the Trussell family are getting on with our experiment.

I want a Dyson vacuum cleaner.

I want to go to Paris.

I'll have advice on what you need to do to stop your phone from spying on you.

I'm going to show you how to do that on both an Android phone and an Apple

phone.

Half of the British public, along with the Trussell family, suspect that their

smartphones are listening in to their conversations in order to target them

with ads.

Social media giants and tech companies deny this, and many experts say they

don't need to listen. They already know everything about us.

There's so much...

data that's being collected, so much that's being tracked about your

behaviours and activities online, from the data that's being shared by your

online interactions, including things that you post on social media, websites

you visit, that they can build up such a detailed profile of you as an individual

or as a consumer that they can predict what might be most interesting.

So how do they gather all that personal information about us?

I want to talk to you about cookies.

Not this kind of cookie. This is for my friend Masai, who's going to be helping

me out. It's for you. Cheers.

Cookies, what are they? Well, they're little bits of data that websites store

on your machine, on your smartphone, your laptop, your computer.

And they're used to track you around the internet. So we're going to do a little

visual experiment.

I've got a bunch of topics here, and Masai is going to help me out. He's

going to tell me whether this kind of topic is the kind of topic that he's

ever looked for on the internet. Now, imagine this white coat that Masai is

wearing. It's a clean coat.

We know nothing about him. We don't know what he likes. We don't know what he

doesn't like. He's a complete unknown.

But this is how cookies start building a picture of what kind of person

you are online.

So, Masai, have you ever used maps online?

Every day. Every day. OK.

Maps. OK. So you use a train ticket. Have you tried to buy a train ticket?

Most days when I travel, yeah. Most days when he travels.

Knitting. Have you looked up knitting?

Absolutely not.

Absolutely not. We're not going to use that.

Flights. Yes.

Flights, yes. We like flights.

News. Would you look at the news?

I do look at the news. You do look at the news. So we know he likes news,

maps, flights, train tickets, walking boots. You must have looked at some kind

of walking boots. I have, actually.

I have for work. Okay.

Houses for sale.

Do you know what? I actually always look at houses for sale. Always looks at

houses for sale.

Kittens.

I'm more of a dog guy. Who hasn't looked at Kitten Smash? Stop lying.

Biscuits, you've just had one.

OK, social media.

I'm on it more than anything. More than anything, that's there.

President Trump.

I'm always looking up Donald Trump. Are you? OK, Donald Trump there.

Betting? Yes.

OK, a big yes there.

Insurance, you've got to have insurance.

Yeah, car insurance.

Car insurance, there we go.

Nail bar.

I haven't. You haven't? Well, I have before.

Nail bar. OK, Masai. We're getting to find out more and more things. Football.

100%. 100%. Here, we're going to put football just here. Online banking.

Oh, every day. Every day. OK.

I'm running out of space.

Smartwatch. Yes, I have an Apple Watch.

You have an Apple Watch. OK, he's there.

Holidays. We've established that, yes, you look at holidays.

Photo book. Make photos. OK.

That's just some topics that we chose random. But look at what we've got now,

right? We've got a much better picture of what Masai likes and what he doesn't

like. So imagine this is Masai's persona when he's surfing the internet.

And when he lands on a web page that is full of ads, what happens is those ads

take a look at all of this.

and they bid amongst each other to show him the ad that they think Masai is

going to like.

Now, my coat, if we were to do this experiment, would look completely

different from that, and yours looks completely different from that. And we

each have an individual coat, if you like, made up of these subjects, these

cookies, and we wear it everywhere we go online.

And based on that, we get ads, we get information.

tailored to us and this is why you get ads following you around the internet

like the plague every bit of information they can gather about you is

used by social media platforms data brokers and third-party companies to

profile you

Behavioral profiling is the way companies form a picture of you, and

they classify you in all these boxes. So they want to know what your purchasing

power is, what kind of things interest you, what kind of things drive you, or

the buttons that they can press that will make you do one thing or another.

And that profile is for sale.

It might be bought by an insurance company, by a bank, by a prospective

employer, by a government.

Back with the Trussells, our family are chatting about their chosen topics

around their smartphones to see if any ads pop up.

Every day at work, I'm in front of five or six different clients.

So every day I've been able to almost talk about it.

Really like a Dyson.

But you keep saying that to your wife. I really like a Dyson.

I also talk to the cat quite a lot. So, you know, I've asked her if she knows

anything about curling. She's not really been able to reply.

This has been no use at all.

Where would you get curling tongs from? How would you buy curling tongs? Where

would you look for curling tongs? Online?

Or would you go to a shop to get your curling tongs?

Under UK data laws, our smartphones and devices should never be listening in on

us or tracking our activities unless we give our permission. But how many of us

say yes to cookies and permissions on our apps and websites, clicking the

consent button?

because it's so much easier than saying no.

In

saying

yes, we can be opening the door to surveillance of our most sensitive

information.

Matilda Davis signed up to social media when she was just 11 and regularly uses

Instagram and Facebook.

She's become much more vigilant after discovering how much of her health and

financial information Meta was collecting.

Give me an idea of what stuff jumped out at you that surprised you that they knew

about. There was a lot of information about health on there, so...

I use an app to get my prescriptions, which is not the NHS app, it's a private

app. And so every time I opened that app, ordered a prescription, paid for a

prescription, that app was sending that information to Meta.

What? Had you at any point agreed to that information to be shared with

Facebook? Not that I had consciously realised.

Right, OK, so health information had gone to Facebook without you knowing it.

What else? It went so granular that...

If I went onto an NHS Trust website, clicked to find advice about

bowel cancer, for example, Meta had all of that information.

It's a serious invasion of privacy.

Hugely, yeah. So one of the other areas that really stood out to me was

financial information.

So things like my online banking apps were all, every time I opened the app...

were sending that information to Meta.

Anytime I looked up financial advice online for a mortgage or things like

that, that was also all being sent to Meta.

This is just outrageous.

Yeah, absolutely horrifying.

For me, what I started thinking was, how personal am I willing

to go with this data?

Like, if some of my, like, deepest held kind of secret...

personal thoughts, am I willing to hand those over to advertisers to let them do

whatever they want with?

And for me, the answer is no. That, to me, feels like an invasion of privacy.

Data can be very abstract.

hard to get your head around it. But if you were to make it physical, you can

imagine yourself going shopping and every time you enter a store, when you

leave, instead of just leaving with your products, you leave with a spy who's

walking right behind you into the next store and into the doctor's office and

into your neighbor's house and then into your own bedroom.

This is one of the most popular news gathering websites on the planet, okay?

They make it very easy for you to hit accept. It's a nice big green button.

But if you decide to look a little bit further into what you're accepting,

well, then it tells a whole different story.

Glasses on because the print gets really small, which is part of the problem.

Okay, so if I click accept, there's a word called partners here. If we click

on that...

They're telling us who they're working with. So they're saying, look, if you

accept, we're going to use your personal data and we're going to share it with

our partners.

So how many partners have you got?

Well, in this occasion, 1,276 different partners who may access

data from my session on this website.

Now, if you scroll a little bit further down, store or access information on

device.

that's pretty important these these companies are going to be able to put

stuff on my device or read stuff from my device so if i click on that how many

549 vendors of people i've never heard of who are going to either put something

on my phone or read something from my phone now all that to

access this news website i'm not quite sure people are aware of how

much

They're giving permission to be used across the internet.

Those things are deliberately written in an inaccessible way.

But if that information hasn't been communicated in a way that is

transparent and accessible, that consent is not fully informed. It's not

meaningful. That's a real problem for enabling people to make informed

choices.

Even if you do read the small print, it doesn't always stop the tech giants from

using your personal information.

to target you with ads that you might not want or that could be harmful

tanya o'carroll has taken the bold step of

suing the multi-billion dollar tech giant meta in a bid to stop this it got

very personal for me when i was pregnant in 2017 and realized for the first time

that you know an experience that many people watching may have also had of

realizing that um facebook knows something that even some of your family

and friends don't yet know which in my case was that i was pregnant and that i

started seeing these ads popping up around life as a parent and as a mother

and i remember it being very jarring because i just at the time it just was

too it was too new

I felt that this was quite creepy and invasive and went into the advertising

settings and found that there was hundreds of these behavioral traits,

characteristics about me that Facebook had decided were things that I was

interested in or things about me that they were selling to advertisers.

And among them, I found more than one that were to do with pregnancy and

birth. Tanya switched these off, detagging them so that she would stop

receiving adverts and posts about pregnancy.

But they didn't stop.

And it felt to me that there was this incredibly invasive just profiling going

on that I had absolutely no agency over and no control over.

Tanya had a healthy baby, but many mothers have complained that Meta has

continued to haunt them with adverts about babies and motherhood after

they've suffered a miscarriage or pregnancy loss.

Like Tanya, their efforts to block the adverts failed.

Really, this case is about giving back.

users and individuals a chance to choose how their data is used online and to say

you know you may be a vital piece of communications infrastructure so I don't

feel I can leave but I want to turn off the surveillance part which is able to

gather so much intimate and intrusive data about my life.

Since this interview Meta settled with Tanya just days before going to trial.

They have agreed to stop using personal information to target individuals with

ads.

Information we share online can also be collected by data brokers and sold to

businesses, from insurers to loan companies.

So when data gets collected, it gets sold in lists.

And one is the list that marketing companies use to target people, and the

other is the list that data brokers use to sell this data on.

These can be based on income, political preferences, age.

You might be a new mum, a value shopper, or a theatre lover.

But there can also be a darker side to some data broker lists.

And they include things like women who have been the victims of rape, men who

suffer from premature ejaculation, patients who suffer from HIV, people who

have lost a child, people who tend to be paranoid.

So you can see how what they're looking for is where you hurt, what makes you

vulnerable, what makes you tick.

Because if they know what makes you vulnerable, they know how to influence

your behaviour and they know what they can sell to you.

Coming up, I'll be discovering how some smart devices can keep a watchful eye on

us in our homes.

The one we tested actually was tracking your precise location 250 times in just

five minutes.

So it was literally going, where are you, where are you, where are you, where

are you?

And I'll be finding out what can go wrong when our personal information

falls into criminals' hands.

I felt quite sick.

I was more upset for the fact that I had fallen for it, I think, than the loss of

the money.

Wow.

That is scary.

Alexa, what's the weather today?

Good morning, Lucy.

Good morning.

It's two degrees Celsius with cloudy skies.

Oh, what?

It's forecast to fog.

In the Trussell household, smartphones aren't the only devices keeping tabs on

them. One in three UK households now have a smart speaker, like an Amazon

Alexa.

84% of families have some sort of smart entertainment.

Everything from our printers to our fridges and doorbells want to know who

we are and what we're doing.

Consumer Association Which has been testing these devices and found that

many of them collect far more personal information about us than is needed for

the product to function, sharing data with the likes of TikTok, Meta and

Google.

Let's talk about some of the products you've actually looked at, which we've

got some of them here. Yes. I'm really intrigued because I've got a special

relationship with air fryers. What's it sharing about you?

It could be how often and frequently you cook, what times you cook, what you like

to cook.

I mean, all these things seem quite innocuous in singularity. And people

often think, oh, well, I've got nothing to hide, so why should I care?

I don't really see it that way. I much more see it what someone else has got to

gain from understanding that.

Because knowing, say, maybe 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 people like to cook

across a geographic area, you can certainly see how that data is valuable.

It's also quite intrusive as well when you think about it.

That's my personal home life. I don't necessarily want it broadcast to the

world, you know? The witch research looked at several different air fryers.

Did you find it was sharing anything else about people, stuff away from

Airfryer? Well, a lot of time it requests this information, so it might,

on the account setup, ask, you know, your name, your address, your date of

birth even sometimes.

Where's that information going?

All over the world. I mean, it could be servers and locations in Europe, in the

UK. It could be America.

It could be as far afield as, say, Russia, China.

And will it share things related to your social media accounts, for example?

A lot of the times when you download apps, it will give you the option to log

on through your social media. Log on via Google, Facebook, X, or using those

accounts. What happens if you do that? Are you giving the keys to your social

media account to your air fryer?

Often, yes.

And actually, I always say to people to be very cautious about logging in that

way because usually there is a much bigger data trade-off.

But equally, you might think, well, I don't use Facebook. Well, actually,

Facebook's got your data, whether you like it or not.

Wait a minute. So I don't have a Facebook account, but I'm using the

smart speaker, the air fryer, the smartphone and the watch.

And I'm sending my data to Facebook, even though I don't have an account.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then there's the smartwatch. Around four million people use them to keep fit

and monitor their health.

You also looked at a wearable, smart watches. What did you find they were

sharing? A smart watch can take a huge amount of information.

You know, we think about, like, kind of the health and well-being stats that we

tend to put in these things. This one's actually quite sort of basic, but

there's ones which can take a range of different metrics about how you sleep,

your hydration, your diet, even potentially with some of your mental

health. um and that is really sensitive information the one we tested a few

years ago actually was tracking your precise location 250 times in just five

minutes so it was literally going where are you where are you where are you

where are you it is a little bit strange that the majority of the people in the

uk don't want things like id cards for example And yet they're very happy to

share their data on social media or with apps that control their air fryers or

their toasters.

It doesn't seem to make sense.

What really doesn't make sense is that we have yet to grasp that our data, our

names, our addresses, what we do, where we eat, where we travel, all that

information is possibly the most valuable commodity on the planet.

And we're just giving it away for free.

So we live in the UK.

But the problem is these ad tracking companies are global and they will sell

our data to whoever wants to pay for it. So it could be sold in a territory

where, for example, they don't have the same levels of data protection.

So we need to be really careful.

It's not just about us living in the UK. This is a global market for our data.

have all suffered data breaches exposing millions of people's data to cyber

criminals your personal data is constantly in demand if you want to sign

up to any online services you're going to have to give a lot of information

away sometimes a little too much information

Take this clothing website. It's one of the UK's most popular websites to buy

clothes on. They ask for name and address. Fair enough, they're going to

send you stuff. Your email address, okay.

But they also want to know my date of birth.

Why do I have to give my date of birth in order to buy some trousers?

Now remember, the more personal data you give away about yourself, the more

targeted you can be by cyber criminals.

For the best part of 20 years, Eleanor Young has been helping to raise funds to

save a medieval churchyard close to her home.

It meant becoming more active online, and it has left her wondering whether

that's how criminals got the information they used to defraud her.

It started with a phone call.

This very polite gentleman introduced himself.

and said he was phoning from the fraud department about my bank account because

there had been unusual transactions.

And he said, well, for security, he would need to go through one or two bits

and pieces.

He confirmed my address.

He confirmed my date of birth.

And just for security, he confirmed the last transaction that had been on my

bank account.

That was what convinced me. The fact that he knew how much money I had spent

recently. Next thing he said that because of this they would need to close

my account and open a new account as soon as possible and that I should

immediately go to the branch and withdraw three and a half thousand

pounds.

Convinced that only the bank could know her most recent transactions.

When the man called again, this time ringing her mobile phone, she followed

his instructions.

I was told to put the money in an envelope and I came home and the next

thing is a courier, the courier supposedly, arrived. He was dressed in

black. He was wearing a black Covid mask.

He gave me the code number and that was it. I handed it over.

My husband's busy saying, what are you doing, what are you doing? And I

couldn't even tell him. I was choked. I was choked up and couldn't tell him for

a while.

I felt quite sick, absolutely sick. I was more upset for the fact that I had

fallen for it, I think, than the loss of the money.

Eleanor didn't get her money back.

The criminals were never caught.

To this day, she doesn't know where they got her personal information from.

It's always quite tricky to be able to tell where a breach happened when

someone's personal details were stolen.

But with Eleanor's case, we think we know maybe where the problem came. So we

checked her email address. We put it in one of those websites. We could check if

that email address has been involved in a data breach.

And I've put Eleanor's email address here, and she's been part of seven.

breaches now two very very big ones one is a genealogy website where just about

90 million customers had their details stolen and a social media website as

well where about 200 million details were stolen now look the problem arises

when people use the same email address and password to protect different things

because if that information is out on the world wide web and you're in trouble

Jake Moore is an expert in cybersecurity and a former police officer working in

digital forensics.

He's uncovered evidence of how criminals get access to people's emails and

passwords through data breaches and then sell them or even release them for free

on social media platforms.

If I was to go to one platform, in fact, I'm going to use Telegram.

It's like a social media, but it also acts as a messaging platform.

I can simply type in a word that I know is associated with these data breaches,

and it'll list all of the corresponding usernames and passwords.

So if I go and click that in right now, and then open what is actually a very

big file, right, it's loaded.

uh yeah i am now looking at 380 000 usernames and passwords that are

connected with spotify netflix and others very easy that's how quick it was

I asked Jake to visit the Trussell family and find out whether their use of

smartphones could have led to their logins and passwords being hacked and

sold on. Hi, how you doing? Nice to meet you. They're most commonly sold on the

dark web, a part of the internet that's not accessible using regular web

browsers. And it's a place where criminality flourishes because users are

able to remain anonymous.

So... We've had a look at your information to see what's actually out

there on the dark web. So, am I right in thinking that I've got a couple of your

emails here, lucy.juicy, for example? Yeah.

So, would I be right in thinking these three may be some of your passwords?

Yeah, yeah.

Do you use the same password across...? Yeah.

That's bad.

One in five people use the same password across multiple websites, and more than

half use easily identifiable information like birth dates or the names of their

family or pets.

So when someone gets hold of, say, one password from one data attack, they're

then able to use it across all your other accounts.

Now they're potentially into your social media or into your email, and then

they've got access to pretty much everything that you've got access to.

A little bit worrying? A little bit. Yeah.

It's really important to have unique passwords for all of your apps and never

to use the same password more than once.

So what about Stephen?

Was Jake able to find his personal information on the dark web?

So there's one other email address that I had a look at, and I believe it might

be yours, Stephen, and it's got a connected password with this email

address. Yeah. Now, just take a look at this and tell me if that is actually...

A corresponding password.

That is something I've used, yes. Yeah. So it would be connected to, say, some

personal information to you that criminals could take advantage of.

Wow.

That is scary.

But there was more.

Stephen's personal information has been put up for sale on the dark web not

once, but twice.

So is this the email that you use for this fitness app?

Yes. Okay, well, I have to say, unfortunately, a few years ago, that

fitness app had all of its information breached in a cyber attack.

And your email address, and therefore all of your information, was scooped up

in there. So it might be worth looking at what information you've given that

app, and I would advise to change the password for that app as well. Okay.

So how surprised are you at what we found here?

Very. Yeah, it's eye-opening.

quite what's out there and how easy it is, I guess, you know, and how easy

we're also making it, you know, at the same time, you know, like opening the

door and letting them in.

Coming up, as our experiment comes to an end, I'll be finding out whether the

Trussell smartphones are listening in.

So we have had conversations at the dinner table and, you know, I've tried

to remind everyone to try and talk about it as much as possible.

I've been talking about digital watches for the last couple of days to my phone.

I want a Dyson.

And I'll have some useful tips on reducing how much personal information

you are giving away. I want to show you how to do that on both an Android phone

and an Apple phone.

heading back to the trussell family where i'm hoping to find out once and

for all if our smartphones are listening in on us lucy hello i also

want to know if they're still as comfortable with big tech companies

having such easy access to their lives so good to see you all again how did you

get on with your experiment let's remind ourselves what we had i remember millie

had basketball yeah louis you had disneyland power disneyland paris uh

the vacuum vacuum cleaner digital what digital watch and curling tongs so did

you manage to sort of like talk about all these things in front of the phones

in front of yeah probably more repetition for me the boys at school

they're not allowed their phones they've got no signal at school right right so

actually of all the people you're probably with your phone the most right

because you're it's on me all the time it's on you Whereas you guys have got to

go to school.

So, did Millie get any basketball adverts? No. No.

Did you get Disney, was it? Yeah. Did you get any Disney ads?

No. No, okay.

Alfie, did you get anything for vacuum cleaners?

No. No adverts.

Very disappointed, I can tell. No, no.

Gutted. Digital watches?

No. So perhaps our fans are not listening to us. No. Did you get curling

tongs? I did.

No! I got three different hits of three different companies. So we're clear, you

didn't search for it? Not at all. No, not at all.

Have you got the ads on your phone?

I do, yeah.

So that was the first one.

With a video of how to do it as well. She's very happy with her curls.

That was the second one.

I mean, it's not what I would call curling tongs, but it's definitely a

device to curl her hair.

And soon, buy one, get one free.

Looks like a Breville toaster for your hair.

You got quite a lot of stuff. I did.

Then another one to find curls.

Again, curling tongs. 70,000 women have used them to awaken their natural curls.

So what's going on here?

According to experts, the most likely reason we see adverts about products or

services we've been talking about is something known as proximity

advertising.

It's highly unlikely that the phone would have been listening to him and

then serving adverts based upon what he said.

Ad tracking is so advanced now that if you look for something on your phone and

then you spend time with someone else and their phone in a similar location

for a period of time, the trackers will start to jump to conclusions that

something they look for might be of interest to you. And that's often where

we perceive.

phones as having listened to us because a conversation we had was actually based

on something they were looking at on their phone because your phones are

close to each other it's reasonable to assume you might be interested too but

we know our smartphones and devices are listening to us if we're using a virtual

assistant like siri or alexa they have to listen for the wake word like hey

siri or alexa

It just shows, you know, we don't know what the company's doing. That's the

point. We don't know. We're supposed to just take them at their word. And what

we really want is law to come into this space so that there are clear red lines

on what they can and can't do and that we all have more control and choice.

Look, now that we've done this experiment, have you been surprised by

the amount of information about yourselves that you've been kind of

unknowingly sharing?

Yeah. Yeah. Possibly, yeah. Yeah?

Do you feel that you've got absolute privacy when you use your phone?

No. No. No.

No one here feels like they've got privacy.

So I guess then my final question would be, will you change your

behaviour? Yeah, I think with the accepting all cookies and

when you say with an app, allow location, it's something I need to look

at more and consider.

Data collection should not be the default.

The default should be no data collection and people should have to opt in and it

should be effortful to have their data collected. It's a much more rational

system. You wouldn't need to spend hours saying no to cookies every time you

don't want your data collected and it would protect the citizenry better.

So I think we really need to give it a good hard think about who has access and

what access and actually...

Do they need to know where we are all the time? Because what if that

information got into the wrong hands?

It's scary just to think about it.

All this may feel a little overwhelming, but there are things that we can do. So

for a start, third-party applications.

Now, those are the apps that you actually put onto your phone after it

comes out of the box. So anything that you would have gone to the Apple Store

or to the Google Store and put onto your phone. Those are the apps that sometimes

take liberties in the permissions that they use on your phone. So things like

your location, your contact list, your photo. your microphone.

But the good news is you can actually take those permissions away from those

apps. And it's actually a really simple and easy thing to do. So I'm going to

show you how to do that on both an Android phone and an Apple phone. On an

Apple phone, you go to the system settings and you hit the privacy and

security tab.

Now, if you scroll down, you'll start to see Bluetooth, camera, local network,

microphone. These are all the functions that apps have. So if I click on

microphone, it tells me all the apps that are using my microphone.

Now, this one's a taxi app. I don't want them to use my microphone. I can switch

that off.

Now, the same applies to an Android phone.

It's really simple. If you go into your system settings and you search for

permission manager.

And it will just come up and again gives you the same stats, contacts, camera,

files, location, microphone. Let's click on the microphone here. It gives me all

the apps that have got access to the microphone.

on this phone so little by little sit down instead of scrolling on reels or

tick tock just spend half an hour and just go through those third-party apps

and make sure that they don't have permission to use things like your

location where they don't really need to and little by little you can start

taking control of what companies can find out from your phone Meta told us

protecting the privacy and security of people's data is fundamental to how our

business works. That's why we have invested heavily in features like

privacy checkup and ads preferences that provide more transparency and controls

for people to understand and manage their privacy preferences.