Your phone is listening

Here’s a VICE article about how your smartphone is listening to the things that you are saying, and is serving you adverts based upon the things that you speak about.

It’s entitled:

Your Phone Is Listening and it’s Not Paranoia

Sadly though, it does appear to have ignited quite a lot of paranoia about the fact that your phone is listening.

Am I the only one not to have known about this before?

I didn’t think this was news. I thought that this was common knowledge. After all, access to the microphone is often part of the permissions that you give apps when you download or update them.

Am I the only one not to be hugely worried by it either?

I’m not routinely planning terrorist attacks or coups d’état (although…?). And if I did, I’d make sure that my phone wasn’t right next to me. And even if it was, I’d probably only get served some google ads about terrorist attacks and coups d’état.

In fact, given that I am going to be served ads while I am on the internet, I have no issue with targeted ads. I’m wont to ignore them all anyway, but at least they might be of some interest to me.

Android is *still* blowing everyone away

Remember when we told you that Android was Blowing Everyone Away back in May of this year?

They were on the up, with about 37% of market share, RIM was in freefall (down to 25%) and Apple was doing “ok”, fairly steady at about 25%. Well, now Business Insider have updated that graph for November – 6 months on:

As BI note:

Android now has 52.5% of the global smartphone market. No matter how you want to slice it, that’s amazing. It’s stealing share from every other smartphone operating system other than iOS, which is basically flat.

Which begs the question, when you look for your next phone – why would you look at anything except Android?

Android is Blowing Everyone Away

That’s not my line up there in the title, it belongs to Business Insider, who published this astounding graph on their site yesterday.

In my line of work, I’m well used to looking at graphs and attempting to observe subtle differences and trends within the data.
This isn’t one of them though, is it?

And while the blue Android line is rising, the green BB is in freefall, which should come as no surprise to anyone. (Least of all anyone who has talked to my wife).