Are food delivery apps listening to you? Chinese users think their apps are spying on them

Suspicious users are pointing the finger at Ele.me and Meituan, but is it any different to the paranoia over Facebook and Google in the West?

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Are food delivery apps listening to you? Chinese users think their apps are spying on them

Masha Borak

Published: 9:32pm, 21 Mar 2019Updated: 8:59am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Some people seem convinced that their smartphone apps are eavesdropping on their conversations… even when these conversations are about something as boring as food.

A recent investigation from a Chinese state media outlet decided to test a rumor: Are food delivery apps stalking users through smartphone microphones to find out what they want to eat? Their results sparked uneasiness among social media users.

Between November 2018 and March 2019, IT Times simulated conversations about food in the presence of phones that had two big food delivery apps installed: Alibaba-owned Ele.me and Meituan.

(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)

Reporters tested both Android and iPhone handsets and found that the probability of getting relevant app recommendations was as high as 60-70%. For instance, two reporters noticed that after chatting about eating Japanese food, the app would “suddenly“ suggest a Japanese restaurant.

The evidence may be somewhat tenuous, but it ties into a common fear that smartphone users around the world have had for some time now.

Western smartphone users have long voiced their suspicion that their smartphones are listening to them. People have shared stories about conversations involving hot tubs that suspiciously resulted in ads about saunas. Or loud ice cream cravings that ended up with stumbling across an ice cream recipe in their social media feed. Facebook, in particular, is often accused of listening to users to generate ads, with little hard evidence other than spooky coincidences spotted by users.