What your smartphone knows about you — and who it tells 📱👀

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It’s 7 a.m. You silence your alarm, open WhatsApp, check your balance. You haven’t posted anything, bought anything, or signed anything. But you’ve already generated dozens of data points — quietly transmitted to servers you’ve never heard of and will never visit.

This isn’t a thought experiment. It’s just how smartphones work in 2025.

Welcome to What You’re Worth, TechGriot’s new series on the invisible economy of personal data: what you produce, who collects it, what they do with it — and how to protect yourself. In this first episode, we’re starting with the basics: what exactly are you emitting, and why does it have value?

The phone that never stops talking 📱

Your smartphone doesn’t just take instructions. It broadcasts constantly. Research by security scientist Douglas Leith at the University of Dublin found that an Android device sends data to third parties — manufacturers, carriers, app developers — every four and a half minutes on average. Not just when you’re actively using it. While you sleep. While it sits on your desk.

That data breaks down into a few categories: identity data (your phone number, IMEI device ID, SIM card identifier), location data (GPS coordinates, nearby Wi-Fi networks, connected cell towers), behavioral data (which apps you open, when, for how long, how you navigate them), and transactional data (purchases, transfers, spending patterns).

None of these individual data points seem particularly alarming on their own. That’s precisely the problem — and we’ll get to why in a moment.

Free apps aren’t free 💰

Most of the digital services you use every day — WhatsApp, Facebook, Google Maps, TikTok — appear to cost nothing. That perception is the foundation of one of the digital age’s most consequential misunderstandings.

These platforms are not public utilities. They’re businesses, and their revenue model is built on a transaction that was never explicitly negotiated: you give them your data, they give you access to their service.

The numbers are instructive. In 2024, Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — generated an average of $49.63 in annual revenue per global user. In Europe, that figure exceeds $70. That revenue comes almost entirely from targeted advertising, which is only possible because of continuous data collection and behavioral analysis.

France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, documented a telling example in its 2024 recommendations: a popular weather app had quietly embedded a software component — an SDK — that collected precise location data from its users. Not to improve weather forecasts. To sell that data to advertisers. The user saw a weather app. Behind it sat a sophisticated ad-targeting machine.

This isn’t an outlier. It’s a business model.

Africa’s mobile-first reality 🌍

The situation in Cameroon — and across much of Africa — has a structural dimension that often gets missed in Western coverage of this issue.

In Cameroon, internet access is almost entirely mobile. According to DataReportal, mobile connections represented 96.4% of the total population at the end of 2025, with 87.5% of those connections qualifying as broadband (3G, 4G, or 5G). MTN Cameroon recorded more than 7.5 million active mobile internet users in the first half of 2025, up 25% year-on-year.

This mobile-first reality has a direct consequence for data collection. Where a European typically accesses the internet through a mix of home broadband, work networks, and mobile — distributing data across multiple actors — a Cameroonian user routes almost everything through their mobile carrier. That carrier knows in real time where you are, who you’re communicating with, how much you’re spending, and when.

Mobile money deepens this further. MTN MoMo and Orange Money, both essential financial tools across Cameroon, legally collect — as outlined in terms and conditions few people read — your full name, national ID number, location at the time of transactions, and a complete financial history. That data holds significant commercial and analytical value for the operators and their partners.

The question isn’t whether this data is collected — it is, legally. The question is what happens to it, who can access it, and how robust the regulatory framework around it actually is. We’ll dig into that in the episodes ahead.

The aggregation problem 🧩

The most common response to data privacy concerns is a version of: « I’ve got nothing to hide. Knowing where I live or what I buy isn’t a big deal. »

This argument misses something researchers call the aggregation problem.

Any single data point is, on its own, unremarkable: your home address, your workplace, the neighborhood you visit on Friday evenings, the name of your doctor. But aggregated, those same data points reveal your daily routine, your religious practices, your financial situation, and your health status — without you ever having disclosed any of that directly to anyone.

A concrete example: your location data alone, stripped of any other information, can indicate whether you regularly visit a specialist clinic, whether you attend a specific place of worship, and whether you live in an affluent or lower-income neighborhood. An insurance company, an employer, or a government agency could potentially use that information to make decisions about you — without your knowledge, and without ever asking.

That asymmetry — others knowing things about you that you don’t know they know — is what makes data privacy a question of power, not just personal preference.

What this actually means for you ✊

You never signed a contract to become a product. But that is, structurally, the bargain that underwrites the modern internet: free services funded by the monetization of your behavior.

In the episodes ahead, we’ll follow the data: what companies actually do with it, how governments use it, what criminals do with it — and what tools exist to take back at least some control over what you emit.

For now, a simple question worth sitting with: if someone compiled a full picture of your digital activity from the past week — location, communications, transactions, browsing — what would that portrait say about you? And would you be comfortable knowing it exists somewhere, without your explicit consent?

💬 Join the conversation: Did you know your phone was transmitting data even in standby mode? Do you think privacy risks are overstated, or that they’re not discussed enough in Africa? Tell us in the comments.

This article is part of What You’re Worth, TechGriot’s series on the personal data economy.