Claire M. Segijn and co-authors win Best Conference Paper at AAA, researching whether people think their devices might be listening in.
We’ve all had it happen: you’ve been talking with a friend about, say, lawnmowers or Kleenex or a certain brand of sneakers, and then, a little while later, you open Instagram. Boom: an ad pops up trying to sell you exactly that product. Is it a coincidence? Is it based on your previous online shopping habits, perhaps? Or is the smartphone in your pocket spying on you?
Media and telecom companies claim they are not listening in, but the perception remains. Associate Professor and Mithun Program Fellow in Advertising Claire M. Segijn has focused much of her research on just this phenomenon and its effects on us: how do consumers respond to messaging when they believe their phones are listening? The American Academy of Advertising has just announced Segijn and colleagues as the winners of the 2026 AAA Best Presentation Paper Award for her paper “When Phones Seem to Listen to Personalize Ads: The Effects of Conversation-Related Advertising on Advertising and Surveillance Responses.”1 Co-authors of the paper are Rongjin (Jinny) Zhang (MA' 25, currently a PhD student at Minnesota Carlson), Joanna Strycharz (University of Amsterdam) and Sanne Opree (Erasmus University Rotterdam).
To celebrate this achievement, Hubbard's Senior Communications Manager Russ White sat down with Segijn to dig into her research around how these perceptions are affecting our behavior as consumers, and where these questions will lead her research next.
Russ White: Let’s not bury the lede here: are our phones listening to us?
CS: Our research is not about whether or not surveillance is happening but how people respond to messages when they believe it is happening. Based on information provided by social media platforms and advertisers, they state that they are not using listening techniques for commercial purposes. They also really do not need it. They already have so much consumer data and the quality is so good, that they do not really need to listen (which may be scarier!).
Why may consumers still believe it is happening? This might be because of several explanations: 1) priming - consumers may have received the ad either way, but because they just talked about it the product is top-of-mind and the ad stands out more to them, 2) confirmation bias - once you believe your phone is listening you find evidence to confirm this belief, 3) misattribution - consumers may also have searched for it but forgot about that or misattribute the ad to the conversation rather than other types of data (e.g., searches, likes, location data), 4) trend/order - what people are talking about may also be something that advertisers are advertising about. Are people seeing ads based on their conversations or are they actually talking about things that they have (unconsciously) seen and then see again... There are a few explanations.
RW: Your research has focused on the psychological and behavioral impacts on consumers of the mere perception of being spied on. How do you see the perceived surveillance by targeted advertising changing consumer behavior, and what methods have you used to quantify those behavioral changes?
CS: Perceptions of surveillance are central to the work we do in this area, and our argument is that this belief is sufficient to trigger responses. To map this phenomenon, we first conducted a survey in three countries; the United States, the Netherlands and Poland. We choose these countries for their different privacy regulations as well as surveillance cultures. One study, published in Social Media + Society, found 52.6% to 77.7% of the respondents indicated that they have had an experience in which they received an ad that was seemingly related to an offline conversation, with the highest numbers reported in the U.S. sample. In another study, published in Big Data & Society, 55.8 to 72% of the respondents believed that it was somewhat-to-very likely that this ad was shown to them because their electronic devices (e.g., smartphones, smart speaker) were listening to their offline conversations. Given the high prevalence in the belief, we were specifically interested in studying the effects, including advertising effectiveness as well as ethical ramifications such as chilling effects (i.e., inhibition of legal activities, such as inhibition of speech around your smartphone). Therefore, we designed two online experiments and one field study (at the Minnesota State Fair) to study these effects.
RW: This past summer, you led a team of student researchers at the Minnesota State Fair in conducting field interviews with fairgoers to test the ramifications of their phones listening in, funded by CLA’s Warwick Midcareer Faculty Research Award. What was the exercise you put participants through?
CS: Our goal was to study how consumers respond to ads that were seemingly related to a previous conversation. However, we could not inform fairgoers about this purpose beforehand because that would influence the results. Instead, we told them we were studying people’s perceptions of online games and asked them to play a game on their smartphones. Halfway through the game an ad would pop up. Afterwards they were asked to fill out a short survey about their experience with the game and perceptions of the ad. What we did not tell the participants was that the casual conversation that the research assistant had with them about the State Fair before they played the game on their phone was part of the study too. With half of the participants we talked about the Princess Kay of the Milky Way butter sculptures and the other half of the participants about the Miracle of Birth Center. The ad that would pop up in the game was for a butter brand. We found that when participants talked about butter they were more likely to believe that their phone had been listening to the conversation, which increased their perceptions of surveillance and negatively affected how they would respond to the ad. We know for a fact that this ad was not based on phones listening to conversations because we orchestrated it. Despite that, we found a difference between the two groups and their beliefs about phones listening. Since this was part of our hypothesis, we made sure that we also debriefed the participants afterwards about the real purpose of the study as well as the fact that companies deny using these practices.
We would not have been able to study this phenomenon and its effects without the generous support of the Warwick Midcareer Faculty Research Award as well as the American Academy of Advertising Research Fellowship. Moreover, this was a true team effort. The students did an incredible job interacting with the fairgoers and assisting with the data collection. Furthermore, LATIS supported the research on the technical side, such as help with the mobile game and ensuring the ad would pop up. Finally, we like to thank D2D and specifically Annie Hotop for making the field study possible at the State Fair. The study would not have been possible without the help of everyone involved.
RW: Personal tech is ever-evolving, and privacy issues will remain at the forefront of consumer protection advocates for every new iteration of smart devices to come. Where do you see your research going from here?
CS: I am currently working on several projects to further understand how folk theories around technology and personalized advertising develop. For example, together with two undergraduate students, we study how affordances of advertising messages (e.g., niche product, timing between conversation and ad) as well as social media platforms (e.g., microphone access request, algorithms) influence the believe that electronic devices are listening to offline conversations for commercial purposes. They also presented their preliminary findings at the AAA this year. Additionally, in other projects, we examine several factors of conversation-related ads (e.g., specificity of the product advertised, timing, social tie with conversation partner) influence how consumers respond to such ads. Finally, we study how we could further inform consumers and alleviate privacy concerns, for example by providing transparency cues on what data is being used as input to personalize the ad. We still have many questions to be answered especially regarding privacy concerns and ethics related to online surveillance for commercial purposes.
Also among the winners at this year's AAA in Austin, TX, are Wenwen Cao (current PhD student), Jiarou Chen (current MA student), and Rongjin (Jinny) Zhang (MA '25), who won student travel grants.
Among the conference presenters were two undergraduates — Nguyen Quynh Anh (Amy) Luong and Anna Zindren, whose project was sponsored by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and whose attendance were sponsored by the Hubbard School's Professional Development Funding.
1Segijn, C. M., Zhang, R., Strycharz, J., & Opree, S. J. (2026, March). When Phones Seem to Listen to Personalize Ads: The Effects of Conversation-Related Advertising on Advertising and Surveillance Responses. American Academy of Advertising, Austin, Texas.
Students involved in the project: Anna Casper, Isabelle (Belle) Greenberg, Gabby Hanson, Brett Johnston, Kaia Ludtke, Quynh Anh (Amy) Luong, Colleen McGowan, Ruiheng (Rachel) Sun and Anna Zindren.