What the Tech: Are our phones listening?
It is one of the creepiest things about social media. You have a conversation with a friend about something random, maybe cowboy boots, and before long, ads for cowboy boots start filling your Facebook or Instagram feed. It feels like your phone must be listening to you.
But according to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, that is not happening. He says Instagram and Facebook do not use your microphone to eavesdrop. Instead, there are other explanations for why it feels like your conversations are turning into ads.
Mosseri said in the Instagram post that he felt the need to address the suspicions because even his wife was skeptical.
“We do not use the phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on you,” Mosseri said. One possibility is that you already saw the ad before your conversation, but it did not register until after you started talking about the product. Another explanation is that you may have tapped on something that was related or searched for it online without realizing how much that action influenced your feed.
But there’s another explanation Mosseri gives that many people have never thought about.
“It could be that you were talking to someone about a product and they before had actually looked for or searched for that product.”
Yes, you may see an ad because your friend searched for it on their computer or phone totally separate from you.
Imagine meeting a friend for coffee. If that friend recently searched for cowboy boots, you may start seeing ads for boots on your own feed, even though you never searched for them yourself.
The system connects your friend’s behavior, your connection to them, and the fact that you were in the same place at the same time. This is why so many people swear their phones must be listening. The truth is, they do not need to.
Social media platforms already collect enough data from what you like, what you follow, how long you pause on a post, and even where you go. By combining all of that information with your friends’ activity, the algorithms can predict your interests so well it feels like surveillance.
If it makes you uncomfortable, there are steps you can take. You can turn off location tracking for apps that do not need it, check your ad preferences to see what categories you are being tracked under, and review which apps have access to your microphone. These changes may not stop targeted ads completely, but they can give you more control over what is being collected.
The bottom line is that your phone is not secretly listening to your conversations. Social media platforms do not have to. They already know so much about you and your friends that they can predict what you are talking about. Still, for many people, no matter what the CEO says, it will always feel like their phones are listening.
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