It was two weeks before Christmas, and I was rushing around to buy the perfect present for my mother.

I wasn’t sure what to get her at first, so I talked to dad and eventually we hit upon the idea of getting her a necklace.

As dad was driving me to school, he prompted me to do a few quick searches for “necklace”, “nice necklace”, and “pretty necklace”... but in the end, I didn’t find anything I liked, so the instant I was dropped off at school, I ended my search.

But when I logged onto Amazon? “Chakra Tree of Life Necklace” was one of the first things that popped up. I bought it immediately, thinking, “Thanks, Amazon!”

Later on, when I kept seeing ads for the same necklace, even when the holiday season was long gone, I had to ask myself: How did Amazon know that necklace would catch my eye? Had it been listening into my conversations with dad? As it turned out, I was onto something.

Not necessarily...but there definitely is someone(s) tracking your every move, and they have much better ways of finding out who you are than just “listening.” It may not be a matter of literally recording what you say, but capturing how you and others connected to you interact with their applications. Still confused? Consider this.

Essentially, what these “listeners” want is information about you. Where have you been? What have you bought recently? Who are your freinds? Are you a woman, a man, or neither? How old are you? Do you lean towards the left or right when it comes to politics?

Big companies like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Amazon use the data they collect from you to curate better content for you. They collect how you react to certain stimuli (i.e. videos, music, photographs and their substance) and use that information to provide you with a better experience of their product. They can also make money by selling that information to other companies.

Well... yes and no. If you want to stop these companies from having access to your microphone, just switch off a few things, like this.

But if you want these companies to stop collecting data on you entirely, there’s no simple solution (unless you want to throw all of your electronics into the ocean). You can restrict their access to data, but you can’t stop them entirely. Sorry.