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Ever have an uncanny moment on Facebook or Instagram when you saw an advertisement for something you were just talking about in real life? You never searched for it on your phone or typed the words on your computer, so how could advertisers possibly know? Was your phone bugging you?

No, your phone is not secretly listening to you.

Last year, Kashmir Hill (now doing investigative work here at The New York Times) wrote about an academic study at Northeastern University that looked for “unexpected activity” transmitted from smartphones — in other words, an audio file secretly broadcast to Facebook or its advertisers. She wrote:

They found no evidence of an app unexpectedly activating the microphone or sending audio out when not prompted to do so. Like good scientists, they refuse to say that their study definitively proves that your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but they didn’t find a single instance of it happening.

The study included apps belonging to Facebook and over 8,000 apps that send information to Facebook. Those apps came up clean. (The study did detect some untoward behavior from other apps — some were recording screenshots and video of what people were doing on their phones and transmitting them to third-party analytics companies. But none of them was listening in on conversations).

This is my personal bugbear, the thing that sets me off on a probably tedious tirade to my friends and neighbors at backyard barbecues and cocktail parties. The simple fact is that your devices gather so much data about you, your whereabouts, your contacts, your browsing activities and the activities of your contacts that advertisers can predict what you’re saying without even actually listening in.