It's almost an open secret at this point that our phones are listening in to what we say, as you'll often notice adverts playing for topics that you've only ever discussed and never explicitly searched online.
For many it's become an unfortunate part of living in a technology dominated world, and what was once alarming or shocking has become mundane at this point with no means of avoiding the issue.
However, you might not be aware of exactly what your phone is listening to and how it works, and details revealed by one former CIA intelligence officer makes the situation far more frightening than previously thought.
As shared by UNILAD, ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou was a recent guest on Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast, and one of his main talking points revealed the truth about how our favorite gadgets invade our privacy on a daily basis.
Advert
When asked about how secure our devices are, Kiriakou offered up an alarming blunt response:
"They're not secure, at all," he declared. "It's not just the NSA/CIA/FBI that you have to worry about, it's the British, the French, the Germans, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the Iranians.
"Everybody has these capabilities, everybody, so you've gotta be very, very careful."
Most people think that their devices are only being listened to by advertisers and companies, but Kiriakou's assessment puts people under the microscope of governments and secret agents at a much larger scale.
He even revealed technology possessed by the CIA which allows the government agency to turn any smart TV's speaker into a microphone, even when the device itself is turned off.
"It can still hear everything that's being said in the room and broadcast [it] back to the CIA," the ex-agent revealed, indicating that the technology on offer is far more sophisticated than most people could have imagined.
It's not even a new discovery either, as Kiriakou indicates that "when I first got hired [in the 1980s] they were able to do that, that's old technology. And then the thing about the car, this was revelatory.
"They can take control, again remotely, of a car's computer system in order to kill you. Crash the car, take it off a bridge, take it into a tree, sure."
This will only become more of an issue as advanced technology creeps more into every facet of modern life, from the cars that Kiriakou discusses to even the locks within your home security system.
It seems that no matter how secure you think your devices are, there's always a way that agencies like the CIA can access them and take control, and that's frightening regardless of how and where it's used.