Majority of people believe their devices spy on them to serve up ads

Most people believe that they have received an online advert as a result of their devices covertly listening to an offline conversation, despite there being no evidence that this takes place.

Joanna Strycharz at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and her colleagues surveyed 886 people in the US, the Netherlands and Poland to discover their views about online advertising. The team chose these countries believing that they represented a range of potential opinions about surveillance, with US privacy laws generally seen as weaker than European ones.