Have you ever seen ads on your phone about something you just talked about on the phone with a friend? This feeling of being “heard” was not necessarily coincidental.

Professor of Computer Science at the famous Trinity College Dublin, Douglas Leith Highlight the practices of two Google apps on Android: Messages (to receive and send text messages) and Phone (to make calls).

according to Futura Science Whoever discovered the recent study by the Irish professor, with every call or SMS exchange, these two apps transmit to Google servers a great deal of information that is usually personal to you.

From this data (which includes the content of hashed messages), Google will be able to identify the sender and receiver and establish the link with searches made during calls. Then it seems that the digital giant is able to give a unique personality to each call or even reconstruct the information that is exchanged during that exchange. Practices that are far from legal, particularly in Europe where the General Data Protection Regulation allows a user to verify or oppose data collection. There, he had no choice, and above all, he was not informed.

Following an alert from Professor Leith, Google said it had already made several major changes to its apps, including user consent to data collection. Also, Messages will no longer retrieve certain information such as the sender’s number.