Journalist Shares 7 'Crazy' Ways Your Phone Tracks You — Including Using The Dust On Your Camera Lens
The tracking is far more sophisticated than most of us realize.
Prostock-studio | Shutterstock By now, we all know that if we have a smartphone, privacy is basically a thing of the past. We've all had the experience of ads popping up for things we casually spoke about near our phones, as if they're listening to us. But the surveillance might be far more sophisticated than any of us realize, and it uses data most of us would never consider.
Max Miller is a writer, journalist, and content creator who covers politics and culture on social media and his Substack newsletter, The Yawp. He recently delved into some of the lesser-known ways our phones watch our every move, and it goes far beyond just monitoring our messages and search histories.
"People both over- and underestimate the amount of data that their phone and other tech devices are collecting about them," he said in a video on the subject. He contends that our phones are not actually "listening" to us via our microphones (though there is much disagreement about this among experts) because they don't have to — they're already scraping data from us in more ways than we could imagine.
1. Mouse movements and finger patterns.
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Obviously, our algorithms on apps like TikTok and Instagram are largely governed by what we do and do not scroll past, and how long we linger on a video or post before doing so. But the tracking goes deeper than that: Our devices also monitor our finger or mouse movements to glean information about what does or does not interest us.
Miller used the example of reading an article and lingering on a certain paragraph of text. "The tracker is gonna be like, OK, the words in that block of text were interesting to you, and we're gonna find keywords with similar words," Miller said. The websites themselves track this information too, and in turn sell it to advertisers.
2. The wireless networks you use and who you share them with.
Miller explained that not only are our devices keeping tabs on the wi-fi networks we use, but they're cataloging who else uses them too, and using that information to triangulate who our contacts are and what interests we hold in common. Retailers famously use this information to sell us things.
Miller explained that cell tower data is used for the same purpose, even among complete strangers like guests in the same hotel or people gathered in the same downtown square. "Which users are all in the same area on the same cell tower? Why are they all in that area?" Miller said. "They can learn so much just from the network you're connected to and what other devices are on that network."
3. The linguistic style you use in posts, messages, and comments.
"Let's say you're on Facebook, but you're using TikTok slang," Miller said. "Well, that's gonna tell Facebook a lot of things." They can deduce everything from your age, since older users don't tend to know TikTok slang, to the kinds of content you like, since certain niches have their own slang.
"You leave a comment on a Facebook post, and all of a sudden, they figured out what you're watching on TikTok, and they can then advertise to you based on that." And it doesn't just stop at advertising: This language data is also frequently used to train AI models.
4. The way you type.
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"Do you type fast? Do you type slow? Do you type with one finger on a full-sized computer keyboard? Or do you type ten-fingered? Do you type with a lot of errors and you have to backspace a lot, or do you have really good accuracy?"
Every aspect of our typing is tracked and used to deduce things about us, Miller explained, like how impulsive we are or even the kind of mood we're in, since angry people tend to type fast and make mistakes, for example. Or when you're sad and typing out huge paragraphs that you then delete because you feel too vulnerable? That's a data point, too, and it's all used to sell you stuff.
5. Your sleep habits.
Most phones these days have some kind of sleep-tracking app built in as a health and wellness feature, but the tracking goes far beyond that. "If you're on your phone at 2:00 a.m., they know you're on your phone at 2:00 a.m.," Miller said. "And that tells them something about, oh, maybe you have insomnia. Maybe we should start recommending sleep aids."
Or you might be the type who has an international job and is checking Slack in the wee hours — that's a data point, too, perhaps sell you business travel-related products or any number of the other things studies have found that our sleep data is used to market, from mattresses to the caffeinated treats at Starbucks.
6. How you use an app.
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This is perhaps the one that feels the eeriest. Miller explained that the different ways we all use and navigate apps are also data points. He used as an example a person with ADHD, who tends to jump around to all different parts of an app — a poster's profile, the comments, their own notifications, back to the post they were viewing, etc.
Through this data, advertisers and data harvesters can extrapolate that you have ADHD and market to you accordingly. This kind of data is also used to determine whether you're a "digital native," whether you're a Type A or Type B personality, and other features of your personality that shape how you can be successfully marketed to.
7. The dust on your camera lens.
Yes, it sounds insane, but Facebook actually filed a patent for the method in 2015. Basically, it involves looking in people's photos for microscopic scratches or bits of dust from a camera's lens. Photos with the same scratches or dust patterns were obviously taken with the same camera at the same time, indicating that the people in the photos attended the same event or might know each other.
That can be used for things like Facebook's "People You May Know" feature or, of course, to sell things to everyone involved. Facebook, of course, claimed at the time that it had never used the method at all for any purpose. It just developed it for fun, apparently. Nothing to see here!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
