How I Almost Ruined My Life With With iPhone’s Accidental Recordings

My iPhone threatens to ruin my reputation, career, marriage, friendships, or entire life. Several times a week. Sometimes, I look down to discover it’s been — unbeknownst to me — recording an audio message.

With one wrong move, I could accidentally send that accidental audio message to, well, anyone.

What might have been in those few minutes of surreptitiously recorded audio? Most likely, just ambient white noise coming from inside my purse or pocket. But it could be terrible! Maybe I was singing along (badly) to the radio. Maybe I was loudly discussing some scandalous social gossip or confidential work information. Maybe I was complaining about my editor. (Brad, I know you’re reading this — I would never.) Maybe I was having a particularly cacophonic bathroom experience.

Accidental iMessage recordings happen on other people’s iPhones, too

I’m not alone — this is happening to lots of people. When I grumbled about this on Threads, I got dozens of replies from people who were also constantly accidentally recording. There are several Reddit posts about the problem, too.

One of those posts contains a pure nightmare: “My phone sent a recording of me peeing to my boss.” They said they quickly sent a follow-up text telling their boss the recording was accidental and not to listen. “I have no idea if he heard it. I can only assume he did and, out of respect, never brought it up,” the redditor told me over direct message.

Another person said they accidentally sent a recording of sexy talk with their spouse to their sister. Yikes!

Of course, sending voice memos and audio recordings can be great! Sometimes, they come in handy when you want to tell a longer story — and especially in group chats. The other day, I sent a four-minute audio recording to my friend detailing some gossip about our social circle. But I want to use audio recordings to gossip — not accidentally be the cause of it. (“Did you hear Katie sent a recording of herself in the bathroom to the group?!”)

What was driving me nuts was that I couldn’t really seem to understand why this kept happening. In fact, when I actually want to send an audio recording, I fumble around with actually knowing how to do it. Hint: It’s not the microphone in the text box — that’s for speech-to-text. The audio message is buried in the list of options when you hit the “+” sign, sandwiched between Stickers, Apple Cash, Send Later, and Memoji. (Tim Cook, I am looking you dead in the eyes and telling you I will never use Memojis. Stop trying to make Memojis happen.)

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I love my iPhone because it usually just works. I understand it, it’s intuitive, and after years of using one, I understand how the features work. But here I was, unable to figure out why this kept happening. Was it a bug or user error?

If this is happening on your iPhone, there’s a fix

It turns out, the “Raise to Listen” feature is ON by default in iMessage.

This feature is for you to be able to listen to audio recordings when you put the phone up to your ear, but it also works the other way. When you have iMessage open and put the phone up to your ear (or close to it — the phone gets confused sometimes!), it can trigger the audio recording.

Here’s how you find it: Go to Settings > Apps > Messages. Scroll all the way down until you see the “Raise to Listen” feature. Toggle this OFF if you don’t want to use it.

It might make it slightly more difficult to listen to audio messages, but it will stop the accidental ones. (When I reached out to Apple for comment on my potential life-ruining, they suggested turning off Raise to Listen if it was an issue for me.)

The Raise to Listen feature has been causing weird accidental audio messages since at least 2015, but it seems (in my experience) that it’s happened much more often in the last year or so.

Now that I’ve turned the feature off, I can breathe (and poop) easily, knowing I wont accidentally send someone a recording. You should do it, too.