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There is an urban legend going around that claims that if you hold your phone up to your mouth and say \\u201cHawaii, Hawaii, Hawaii\\u201d that you will start getting ads for holidays in Hawaii within an hour on Facebook. It\\u2019s tinfoil hat time!

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This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I\\u2019m Dante St James.

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There are three main reasons why I can guarantee that your social media platforms are not listening to what you are saying:

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1.\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0Turning on your microphone without permission isn\\u2019t allowed by Apple or Android

2.\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0Listening to audio and transmitting it would use up a huge amount of data every day

3.\\xa0 \\xa0 \\xa0Storing audio from billions of phones all day, every day would take up more data storage space than current exists

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While logic is not going to undo the opinion of an avowed conspiracy theorist, let\\u2019s break these down anyway.

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You ultimately have the power to turn on and turn off access to your microphone in the settings of your phone. iPhones will prompt you if something wants to use your microphone, camera or location beyond the use of a particular app at the time you are using it.

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If you really do think your phone is listening to you, you can turn off the ability for apps to use your microphone at all. It\\u2019s in your settings. And it\\u2019s not just Apple that gives you that ability. It\\u2019s also Android. When you install an app that, at various times, needs access to location, camera or microphone, it has to ask your permission to have access to them. And just like Apple, Android phones allow you to revote that permission whenever you like.

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Both systems will prompt you if there are apps that are using any phone resources like the camera, location services or a microphone when you\\u2019re not using the app. It\\u2019s then up to you if you want to restrict access to different parts of your phone hardware to not being able to use those features at all, only use them when the app is in use, or to allow them access all the time.

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While there is no reason for any app to use the camera and microphone while you\\u2019re not using the app, if you\\u2019re worried about someone listening, then turn off this permission. Problem solved.

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Perhaps the most compelling reason why Facebook and other apps don\\u2019t want to listen to your conversations is that it takes a lot of power and a lot of data to do this. Even with the best compression and the biggest battery, it\\u2019s just like being on a WIFI phone call, Facebook audio call or a Messenger audio call for 24 hours straight. You just can\\u2019t do that on a phone without running your battery down in less than a couple of hours \\u2013 and using Gigabytes of data. You\\u2019d be out of data and battery so quick that you\\u2019d know that something was going on.

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It\\u2019s a tell-tale sign that something is wrong when you have a battery that runs out way quicker than it should. It\\u2019s either a rogue app draining your power or a process running that is using a lot of your phone\\u2019s processor time.

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Frankly, Facebook, TikTok and any other app don\\u2019t use enough bandwidth or power to be doing this. If they did, both Google and Apple would kick them off their phones.

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Social media, search and other online platforms store the minimum amount of data about you that they possibly can. And that is usually in the form of generalised bundling of interests and behaviours such as frequent travel, whether you appear to be a business owner or if you\\u2019re someone who likes to shop online often. This data is kept as small and lean as possible because space on servers for this kind of thing is expensive, and there\\u2019s only so much space on all their servers to hold this kind of thing.

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As more and more people come on to these platforms, Facebook, Google, TikTok and everyone else can\\u2019t just simply build endless data centres to store whether you\\u2019re a Coalition or Labor voter. In fact, the information about us that we\\u2019re often most sensitive about, such as what TV shows we watch, the alcohol we drink, whether we like guns, what drugs we take and whether we like to watch adult videos online, etc; none of it is of any use to these platforms, but none of these products or services are allowed to advertise on their platforms anyway.

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Between your browsing habits and what you do while on Facebook and Instagram or TikTok and Pinterest or whatever you are using, there is more than enough information about you to help them to target ads at you.

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The cold hard truth is that you are not as special, unique, or one-of-a-kind as you may think you are. When there is 7.5 billion of us on the planet and we tend to stick around the cultures we are part of, there\\u2019s not a lot of variety in the patterns that emerge about us all.

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It\\u2019s easy to tell who is interested in baby items because just about all parents-to-be behave in predictable patterns and have predictable interests. It\\u2019s much the same for those who are considering getting married. Even with a multicultural society, there are patterns that we are not even aware of that we fall into when we\\u2019re engaged. No one has to spy on your conversations to know that you are heading through a certain stage of your life. And it\\u2019s not hard to guess that you are about to go to a music festival when you\\u2019ve been to it for three years in a row at this time of the year and display a predictable pattern of interest in certain bands and artists as that festival approaches.

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To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.