TL;DR - I reached a breaking point on the phone-listening possibility and I bought a faraday cage for mine (pictured below resting on my knees to show scale – I’ve got an iPhone 6+ so it’s large). The purpose of this device is to stop all transmissions going into and coming out of the phone on an elective basis. It works – you put your phone inside and it’s cut off from the world.
The only limitation I have discovered to date is that incoming phone calls do not log. Voice mails will get pushed to the phone after it has had a chance to sync upon re-emerging into the world. But the calls themselves never show up on the list of "Recent".
Silver lining on this cloud: My engineer husband, the world’s greatest skeptic, was witness to one of my most blatant apparent listening events, and is now a believer. There’s almost no possibility that what happened to us was the result of random chance. More likely is that I’ve got some rogue app on my phone, and rather than going through all my different apps trying to find which one has embedded malware, I chose to cut to the chase and just shut the phone up whenever I feel the need to ensure privacy.
Here’s the story that led me to conclude "enough is enough":
Husband and I went to lunch at a local restaurant in my car, which is old and which has no connectivity tech in it (so the car could not have been the offender).
During the return trip, we were on the road situated behind a car with a bumper sticker that said, "But did you die?" I turned to husband and said, "What the freak does that refer to - 'but did you die'? I have never seen that phrase in any context before." We proceeded to discuss it. Being 10 years younger and still interacting online with his college buddies, my husband often knows of pop culture references that I don't. But he did not understand the origins of it either.
Like clockwork, the next morning on Instagram, I received sales advertising for "But did you die?" products (image below). I did not do an internet search this phrase on any device and neither did my husband - nor did we continue to discuss it once we had exited my car.
There are three possibilities:
(1) My iPhone is listening in on me and parsing the words that come out of my mouth, or
(2) There's a sophisticated system of geolocation that associated me spatially with a previous buyer of a "Did you die?" product (this would also require the other driver’s phone to also be monitored). The idea being, if I saw it in front of me on someone else's car, maybe I might like to buy one, too, so the algorithm should offer me a link. Or,
(3) It was a coincidence.
I don’t believe (3) because it’s just too obscure of an example, especially given the exquisite timing. This was not a common or generic product we were discussing. There are approximately one hundred thousand consumer products that Instagram might have impressioned me with the next day, but it picked the only one we had discussed out loud. Odds are vanishingly low of that happening by chance.
I suspect (1) is the culprit. If (2) were the case, that kind of association should happen more than once. I pass a dozen bumper stickers a day, some pretty funny - funny enough to make me laugh out loud, like maybe I enjoyed it so much that I would like to buy one, too. But I don't get product sales impressions for those when that happens. I have to either speak the exact words that marketing software can pick up on, or someone has to transmit the words in association with me.
There’s also the issue that this is not the only such example – just the most blatant recent example for which I had a witness. I also had a case in the past month or so when I spoke the name of an obscure medication out loud, and received a product impression for that medication on Instagram the next day. There are 1,500 medications that have been approved by the FDA – am I supposed to believe it got lucky enough to pick the exact one out of 1,500? On top of all the other times when it gets lucky way outside of statistical expectations?
Enough is enough.
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