The Internet runs on advertising. Everyone from huge tech companies to scrappy start-up websites rely on ads. There's just one problem: People hate advertising and the tracking that comes with it – and droves of us have started blocking them.
So... should we be paranoid? Do we know whether our gadgets are passively listening to us? No. We don’t know for sure, beyond what they tell us in their privacy policies. But we do know that voice recognition is what many major companies are trying to get us to start using. Google has OK Google, Apple has Siri, and Amazon has Echo, a home appliance that listens to you all the time. We know that many third party apps use location data services, and we know that personalization – especially personalized ads – rely on tracking.