Top News

If it sometimes feels like your phone is listening to you and reading your mind, tech expert Aakash Gupta says you’re not wrong. Devices collect so much data that they can basically anticipate everything you want and need.

Phones can be downright creepy these days, the way they seem to predict your every move and thought. Targeted advertisements pop up for something you were just talking about, leading people to think their phones are listening to and watching them. Even the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, worryingly tapes the camera and mic of his computers. 

According to Gupta, you aren’t being paranoid if you feel like your phone is reading your mind. The way technology and data collection work, it basically is.

If it seems like your phone is reading your mind, a tech expert says that’s because it basically is.

In a post to X, Gupta explained that feeling like your phone is reading your thoughts isn’t far from the truth because “every time you open a website or app, a real-time bidding auction fires in under 100 milliseconds.” 

This auction tracks your location through GPS, browsing history, and a whole lot of other data markers collected over time by your device in less than a second. Yes, all that data collection happens instantaneously when you visit a website or app, and your information is stored along with all your digital habits. 

: Psychology Says People Who Get Separation Anxiety When They Don’t Have Their Phone Usually Have These 4 Reasons

It takes only milliseconds for apps to share your data.

Stock 4you | Shutterstock

It is alarming how much personal information is stored about those who are digitally connected. And let’s face it, we’re all digitally connected nowadays. It would actually take more effort to digitally disconnect, so to speak. 

Consumer data has become a commodity in our modern world, and all that data sharing is happening at an alarming rate. Gupta explained that in just 100 milliseconds, “your GPS coordinates, browsing history, device fingerprint, age, gender, income bracket, and hundreds of inferred interest categories get packaged into a ‘bid request’ and broadcast to hundreds of companies simultaneously. One company wins the ad slot. All of them keep the data.” 

MIT neuroscientists say this fraction of a second is the same amount of time it can take for the brain to recognize an image. The rapid processing speed of a computer, capturing and releasing your data, comes with much more information than a human can process in that amount of time. Gupta added that, extraordinarily, “this happens thousands of times per day per person.”

: There’s A Specific Phone Habit That Experts Say Is Worse For Your Brain Than Your Screen Time

Apps study your digital footprint to the point of predicting what you’ll do next with great accuracy. 

One of the many downsides of this data sharing is the breach of privacy. Perhaps you’re innocently looking up health- information, and the next thing you know, you’re targeted by supplement companies. But that’s innocent compared to what all your accumulated data can do in terms of surveillance.

Gupta reported that “the FTC caught two brokers in 2024 categorizing people by visits to reproductive health clinics, political protests, and religious services, then selling those profiles to law enforcement.” 

What many people don’t realize is that this data collection goes beyond social media algorithms designed to sell you things and show you reels that you’ll most likely heart or like; it predicts your behavior. And that’s why it feels like your phone is reading your mind.

A 2022 study reported that “the risks of big data analytics are very real. Biases have been identified in the data and algorithms guiding law enforcement decisions, medical decisions, and in language corpora.” Corpora, plural of corpus, refer to the large collections of electronically stored text and audio data used for linguistic research. 

There are solutions to avoiding big data and maintaining privacy.

Alliance Images | Shutterstock

While our devices aren’t psychic, they collect so much information about us that it seems like they are predicting outcomes. For example, Gupta mentioned in his post that a father found out about his teenage daughter’s pregnancy as a result of data collection from Target, which sent baby coupons to their house. 

You’d have to be pretty all over the place for big data not to know what your next move might be. There are solutions, though, if this becomes spooky and bothersome. You can switch to a browser that secures privacy, like Firefox. Switch from Google as your main search engine to one like DuckDuckGo, and to keep sites like Facebook from surveilling you, you can update your settings to “in-app only.” But the fact remains that it would only be a drop in the bucket of the data collected from just having a phone in your pocket or purse every day. 

Even if you can’t stop all your data from being shared, being aware of the tracking is powerful in and of itself. You can’t be manipulated when you understand that what you see on your screen is meant to target you specifically. You might just start looking at your phone like a stereotypical used-car salesman. 

: Restaurants & Bars Are Starting To Ban Phones, But Some People Say It’s Unsafe

Laura Lomas is a writer with a Master’s degree in English and Creative Writing who focuses on news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.