Urban Clap notification spooks Twitter user, but it ends well

Planning to visit a wedding this weekend? How does an app know this? This shocked communications professional Tinu Cherian Abraham and his wife because they were. Is your phone spying on you on behalf of apps that you downloaded?

IndiaToday.in  | Posted by Vivek Surendran
New Delhi, November 23, 2017 | UPDATED 11:44 IST
Urban Clap tweet that spooked a Twitter user. Photo: Twitter(@tinucherian)Urban Clap tweet that spooked a Twitter user. Photo: Twitter\(@tinucherian)

Tinu Cherian Abraham is a Twitter celebrity of sorts. A communications professional with close to 4 lakh followers, he also follows back most people, Tinu has an above average knowledge of how the internet and apps work.

But last week, when his wife received a notification about whether they were planning to attend a wedding, even Tinu was shocked.

Because they did not have it on email (specifically Gmail) that Google would know. He had not searched for anything remotely related to a wedding on Google either. He had not interacted with the Urban Clap app that sent the notification. They were going to attend a wedding that weekend though. But how did the app know?

Privacy, especially with phones, has become a huge issue now that we know apps collect data about our movements, crawl through our emails and know what we do when.

The applications we download on our smartphones -- Android or iOS -- seek permission to access a lot of data on our devices. But what do we do?

We accept their terms the same way we click on "I accept" while installing softwares on computers and creating accounts on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter - without reading what exactly is written in the agreement and without understanding the privacy policies we are agreeing to.

This gives social media giants, apps and Google an edge to use the data they collect from our devices. They analyse the data, study our behaviour by figuring out patterns and derive at psychological insights using it, easily making a character sketch of the user.

The apps do it using the 'check-in's we do on Facebook, with the locations we call cabs at, studying the kind of products we purchase online, using the GPS that is left on the device, and many a time, even listening to our private conversations over calls and messages. It is usually done to push personalised advertisements but the data could be misused in frightening ways.

Google and other big corporations say no human sees the data stored on their servers so there's no threat to privacy. Most of the suggestions (advertisements or otherwise) are pushed by artificial intelligence (AI) and users have anyway agreed to shared the data for their own convenience.

This all sounds nice but we learned this week that apps can collect data even when we have not agreed to share. We are not talking about rogue apps (Hello, Chinese!) but the giant Google itself. Last week, the website Quartz revealed how your Android phone sends your location data to Google servers even when you have turned off location settings. Google said it was done to send the user area-based messages but admitted it wasn't the right thing to do and it would stop doing that.

So, is your phone listening to every word you say? The truth is yes. Does anyone else hear your conversations even when you are not on phone? No. But even when you are not using the phone, the phone listens to your offline conversations. In Android, to look for the hot word: OK Google. Similarly iPhones wait for the word: Hey Siri.

This, phone makers, claim is not sent to their servers until you have said those respective hot words.

So did her phone hear their offline conversations to know they are planning to attend a wedding last week? The notification Tinu's wife received read, "Wedding to attend this weekend?" along with a promotional code that could be used to get discounts.

Tinu, a social media consultant and influencer, was perplexed. He tweeted about this. In his tweet to Urban Clap, he asked, "How did you know we had a wedding to attend over the weekend? Google, you were eavesdropping?"

Tinu made the operative part clear: "We didn't even search anything or put up something online related to the wedding".

Tinu's concern comes at a time when Google has been found guilty of tracking people's phones around the world even when they turn off location services or even remove their sim cards.

Urban Clap, however, responded to Tinu's concern saying, "The last weekend was amongst the most auspicious occasions for weddings across India, so it was more of a calculated guess than anything else. The notification is also something we send after understanding of the usage pattern of the customer on our app. No eavesdropping!"

Well, that ended well. But the debate over unauthorised eavesdropping by phone softwares is not ending soon. We hear users in many countries are planning to sue these corporations for not revealing all the ways they collect user data. And even if they reveal, we, the users don't want to read through the words before we tap 'I agree' or 'Authorise'.