Is My Phone Listening to Me? How to Stop Your Phone from Listening to You

Is my phone listening to me? Two of the world's most powerful tech companies just agreed to pay $163 million over that exact question.

In December 2024, Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit claiming Siri had been recording private conversations without anyone saying "Hey Siri." One plaintiff said he received an ad for a surgical treatment after discussing it privately with his doctor. Another got ads for Air Jordans and Olive Garden after mentioning them out loud. Apple denied wrongdoing. A federal judge approved the settlement in September 2025.

Then in January 2026, Google agreed to pay $68 million to settle an almost identical case: that Google Assistant recorded conversations without the "Hey Google" wake word, and that some of that audio reached advertisers. Both companies paid rather than argue it in court. Neither admitted fault.

So if you want to know how to stop your phone from listening to you, you are asking the right question. The honest version is more involved than most articles admit. Here is what is actually happening, what the evidence shows, and what genuinely works. For the wider picture on how your phone tracks you at the OS level, location, ad identifiers and background data, read our guide on phone tracking in Australia. This post is about the microphone.

Is My Phone Listening to Me? What the Evidence Shows

Not in the way most people picture it, but not as innocently as Big Tech would like you to believe either.

A major Northeastern University study analysed more than 17,000 Android apps and found no evidence of apps continuously recording audio in secret and uploading it to remote servers. Cybersecurity firm Wandera ran similar tests and reached the same verdict: constant covert background recording is not what is happening.

But "not constantly recording" is a long way from "not listening at all." Here is what is actually running on your phone right now.

Siri and Hey Google: Wake-Word Detection Is Always On

If Hey Google is active on your Android phone, or Hey Siri on an iPhone, the microphone is always processing audio locally.

That is not a flaw, it is how the technology works. The phone has to listen continuously for the trigger phrase, or it cannot respond when you say it. The problem is that the system makes mistakes.

Google's own court documents in the $68 million settlement confirmed that Assistant sometimes activated with no wake word at all, what engineers call a "false accept." When that happened, the audio that followed was recorded, and in some cases shared with advertisers. The Apple Siri case made the identical allegation. Northeastern researchers separately found over 1,000 word combinations that could falsely trigger smart speakers into active listening: ordinary words you would use in any normal conversation.

Apps With Microphone Permission Can Use It Freely

When you grant an app microphone access on a standard phone, the permission is broad.

A 2024 Consumer Reports investigation found that over 60 per cent of mobile users had microphone access switched on for apps with no legitimate need for it: weather apps, shopping apps, games and utilities. Google itself classifies microphone access as a "dangerous permission," its own term in the Android developer documentation, because it exposes such sensitive information.

Yet millions of Australians tap "Allow" without reading why an app is asking, and the permission then sits there indefinitely. Android shows a green dot when an app uses your microphone, and iOS shows an orange dot. Both help, but only if you notice them, understand them, and act.

A Google Play App Recorded Audio for Nearly a Year

In May 2023, cybersecurity firm ESET discovered that a screen-recording app called iRecorder, with over 50,000 downloads from the official Google Play Store, had been quietly updated to add malicious code. Once installed, it recorded one minute of ambient audio every 15 minutes and uploaded it to a remote server. It had been doing this undetected for almost a year.

A Marketing Company Admitted It, Then Deleted the Evidence

In late 2023, US media company Cox Media Group published materials boasting that its "Active Listening" technology could identify potential customers from conversations captured through smartphone microphones in real time. Their own, now-deleted, blog post stated that it is legal for devices to listen, and that Active Listening is often buried somewhere in the fine print of an app's terms of use.

In August 2024, a leaked pitch deck obtained by 404 Media confirmed the company had been pitching this to advertisers and naming Facebook, Google, Amazon and Bing as partners. Google dropped Cox from its partner programme, US senators opened investigations, and the company deleted the materials and said it regretted the confusion.

The mechanism appears to have leaned on audio captured after wake-word activations rather than constant recording. But their own words confirmed the point: microphone audio was being used commercially, hidden in terms most people never read.

How to Stop My Phone from Listening to Me: Steps That Work Now

If you are on a standard Android phone or iPhone, take these steps today. Just be clear about what each one fixes and what it does not.

Why Turning Off Settings Doesn't Fully Solve It

Here is what most "how to stop your phone listening" guides skip entirely.

Every step above operates inside a system that was built for data collection. You are adjusting that system's settings. You are not replacing it. Turning off Hey Google removes the Assistant's wake-word listener; it does not remove Google Play Services, the background layer running underneath almost every standard Android phone, which keeps collecting device identifiers and behavioural data regardless of what you toggle.

You are trusting Google's settings to limit what Google's own software does. That is the same Google that paid $68 million rather than defend how its assistant behaved. The same logic applies to Apple: switching off Siri removes the listener, but it does not change the architecture of a closed system that settled a $95 million lawsuit over what Siri did while operating as designed.

How to Stop Your Android Phone from Listening: The GrapheneOS Difference

If you want to genuinely stop your phone from listening, not just reduce the risk within a system designed to collect data, you remove Google's infrastructure from the device entirely.

That means GrapheneOS: a free, open-source operating system built on Android's open-source base, with Google's data-collection layer stripped out and a hardened security layer built in its place. It runs only on Google Pixel hardware, the one consumer phone that meets its strict security requirements. Here is what it changes on the microphone question specifically.

• No wake-word listener. GrapheneOS ships with no Google apps or services, so there is no Google Assistant and no Hey Google running in the background, and no Siri either. The always-on listening behind both settlements simply is not present. Nothing to misfire, nothing to record a false accept, nothing to hand to an advertiser.
• The Sensors Off tile. One tap in Quick Settings blocks every sensor for every app at once: microphone, camera, gyroscope, the lot. Apps receive zeroed data, not a software request they might work around. This is hardware-level blocking that no setting on a standard phone can match.
• Per-app network permission. Even an app you have given microphone access can be cut off from the internet completely, a control that does not exist on standard Android. An app that cannot connect cannot upload what it records. That alone defeats the iRecorder attack.
• Granular per-app sensor control. Grant camera but deny microphone to the same app. Restrict sensors separately from network. Set the device to deny sensor access to all installed apps by default, the opposite of how standard Android behaves.
• Open source and auditable. The entire codebase is public. No hidden telemetry, no quiet expansion of what the OS may do with your microphone. You do not have to take anyone's word for it, because anyone with the skill can read the code.

If you do need a Google app, sandboxed Google Play runs in an isolated container with no privileged access, and cannot reach the microphone without your explicit permission under GrapheneOS's stricter system.

When You Need Hardware Certainty: Faraday Bags

Software controls, even GrapheneOS ones, operate at the software level.

There are moments where that is not enough: sensitive legal discussions, medical appointments, high-stakes negotiations, or any time you need the device genuinely unreachable rather than carefully managed. A Faraday bag gives you hardware isolation. The phone goes in, and every radio signal, cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS, is blocked. The device cannot transmit or receive anything, and if it cannot transmit, it cannot upload audio.

We stock the full SLNT range, from phone sleeves to utility bags and backpacks with military-grade shielding that blocks cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, RFID, NFC and EMF. You do not carry your phone in one all day. You use it when it counts.

What FreedomTech Builds

Every phone we sell is a Google Pixel running GrapheneOS, configured by us, tested before it leaves, and shipped with the FreedomTech manual so you are never left guessing. Brave pre-installed and hardened. Signal set up. ProtonMail configured. F-Droid ready to go. No Google Assistant, no Hey Google, no Siri, no wake-word listener running in the background.

We handle the technical work. You get a phone that works for you, not for Google, not for Apple, not for advertisers, and not for whoever buried microphone access in the fine print of an app you downloaded six months ago. That is what it feels like to stop your phone listening to you at the infrastructure level, not the settings level. For the bigger picture, read our hub on deGoogled phones in Australia.

FreedomTech · The Privacy Experts · freedomtech.com.au