Facebook is listening

There are lots and lots of rumours that Facebook listens to you.

Louise, sitting on the desk next to me, came in this morning saying that Facebook was listening to her because whenever she spoke about something Facebook started to show ads for it.

So I decided to do a little bit of investigating and discovered… there are loads of people experiencing the same thing.

In fact, you don’t have to look very hard to find hundreds of examples.

So is it true?

Well Facebook categorically say that they don’t record audio and they don’t use audio to determine what to advertise to you.

But…

They do have an audio recognition feature in their app which tries to recognise the sounds happening around the phone. In theory this only happens when you’re updating a post.

However, it means that they can clearly turn on your microphone and listen to you whenever they want.

So the question is…

How much do you trust Facebook to do what they say they do. After all, they do have a history of not caring about their users privacy and not being completely upfront about it.

If you don’t trust them there’s one thing you can do… turn off the microphone in your phone and then the Facebook app can’t turn it on even if it wanted to.

Over and out,

Michael
(investigator of Facebook consipracy theories)