Your phone might be secretly listening in to you – five changes to protect yourself from spying and urgent setting tweak

CYBERSECURITY experts have revealed five tips that could stop your phone from eavesdropping on you.

The specialists at Kaspersky revealed the tips after marketing firms made statements they've since retracted about listening in to conversations.

Kaspersky's explains: "News broke recently about two marketing firms allegedly bragging about offering targeted ads based on just such eavesdropping.

"Granted, both companies later retracted their words and removed the relevant statements from their websites."

Despite the retraction, the cyber experts decided to give a list of ways users could protect themselves.

The first involves disabling your microphone permissions.

It's worth doing this for all apps that don't need access to your microphone.

For example, if a torch app is asking to access your microphone, it could be a scam.

You can do this individually in the app's settings.

The experts also recommend turning off the voice assistant on your phone.

Voice assistants are designed to listen to you in case you ask for their help.

They don't listen continuously but if you're worried, it's easy to turn a voice assistant off in your Settings app.

The next three tips aren't to do with your smartphone but can keep you safe from eavesdropping.

Kaspersky recommends getting rid of any smart speakers in your home.

It also advises controlling the apps that have access to your microphone on your computer.

Finally, the experts recommend turning off the voice control feature on smart TVs.