It’s a question I’ve been asking for a while after seeing adverts for things I’ve been talking about – but not searching – popping up on my phone.

While we are all used to targeted ads – seeing pictures of things we’ve just searched for appearing in ad spaces on the websites we visit after – many people think advertisers and phone companies are taking this one step further.

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If voice recognition apps like Siri and Bixby are always listening for commands, is it really beyond the realm of possibility that they are also sending ads our way based on what we’re talking about?

While tech giants including Facebook and Apple vehemently deny they are using phones to listen into customers’ conversations and then sell the data onto advertisers, I wasn’t so sure I believed them.

So I decided to investigate and run a scientific experiment to find out why I was getting these ads, and prove my theory one way or another.

I pulled together a list of topics – business cards, spandex, vegan food – stuff I had never Googled before, and began talking about them in earshot of my phone.

I made sure my phone’s microphone was turned on in all my apps, and kept using social media- like Facebook and Instagram – in exactly the same way.

Within days I was inundated with ads related to these key words.

Firstly, I got an advert offering 50 percent off my first purchase of business cards – something I’d never thought about or searched for before but had talked about with a friend, with my phone on the coffee table next to us.

While I happily eat meat, I also told my friend I had plans to cook up some healthy vegan dishes using a new cookbook instead.

Sure enough, I was subjected to an advert for healthy vegan meal plans later that day. . . .

It might sound far-fetched, but Edward [Whittingham, cyber expert and DefenceWorks founder]  recommends trying out the experiment at home for yourself.

He says: “If readers aren’t sure, I’d encourage them to try it for themselves – pick an obscure topic that you’ve never searched for you on your device and start talking about it in earshot of your phone.

(Excerpted from SUN, Miranda Knox reporting)