Your Phone Is Spying on You

It’s a Saturday afternoon, and you’re watching soccer videos on YouTube. Later that day, you open Instagram and an ad for soccer cleats appears. In fact, every website and app you visit has started showing you ads for soccer stuff: jerseys, shin guards, FIFA 22. 

Strange coincidence? 

Nope.

Turns out your phone is spying on you.

Every time you go online, there is a good chance that you’re being watched, thanks to something called tracking technology. Like invisible spies, tracking technology gathers information about you—what you watch and listen to, what you like on social media, what you buy, what you search for. According to The Markup, a nonprofit organization, 87 percent of the most popular websites participate in some form of digital tracking.

So why does anyone care what you’re up to online? 

Businesses track online activity to better understand their customers and provide a more personal experience. TikTok tracks what videos you like so it can recommend other ones you’ll enjoy. Nike tracks what sneakers you buy so it can suggest the perfect T-shirt to match your new kicks.

But that’s not the reason you’re seeing ads for soccer gear all over the internet after watching a few soccer videos. That has to do with something called targeted advertising.

Here’s how it works: Big companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, use tracking technology to find out what you’re doing online. Apps like TikTok and Snapchat do it too. These companies then sell this information—or data—to advertisers. Advertisers use that data to place ads for things you’re likely to be interested in—like those soccer cleats—on the sites and apps you visit.

Tracking is perfectly legal—with some exceptions. If you’re under 13, companies need permission from a parent or guardian to collect and share information about you. Without that permission, companies can be fined. (Note that many social media sites require users to be 13 or older to sign up.) 

But while kids’ data is technically untouchable, data on teens and adults is there for the taking. 

Today, there is a growing debate around tracking and targeted advertising. Some say that it’s an invasion of privacy. Others say that if companies are honest about what they’re doing, tracking is not a big deal. It’s just part of life in our increasingly digital world. 

What do you think? Read what Carla and Daniel have to say, then decide who makes the stronger argument.

Thankfully, some promising changes have been made. In 2020, California passed a law that says consumers can opt out of having their data shared with advertisers. And in April 2021, Apple released an update that allows iPhone users to stop apps from tracking them for ad targeting purposes. 

And guess what? Three weeks after Apple launched this new feature, only 6 percent of users in the U.S. chose to let apps track them, according to Flurry Analytics. 

Clearly, most people don’t want to be tracked. So why is it still happening? 

^{This article was originally published in the May 2022 issue.}