But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says it’s not true.
This is one conspiracy theory that refuses to die. Again and again, people have claimed that they were served advertisements on Facebook on the basis of their real-life conversations, or on the basis a song they were listening or a movie they were watching. The allegation basically is that Facebook listens to users through microphone in phones and then uses the information for advertisements. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says it’s not true.
Zuckerberg, who testified in front of senators part of Justice and Commerce committees in the US, said Facebook listening through microphones is just a conspiracy theory.
“Yes or no, does Facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about users?” Senator Gary Peters asked Zuckerberg.
But as Peters started to move to the next question, Zuckerberg came back to the microphone topic. He made a passionate and very clear statement saying that the microphone thing is completely and baseless false.
“Senator, let me get clear on this, you’re talking about this conspiracy theory that gets passed around that we listen to what’s going on your microphone and use that for ads,” he said.
Then he added that there are times when Facebook uses the camera in a phone. “To be clear, we do allow people to take videos on their devices and share those, and videos have audio, so we do while you’re taking a video, record that and use that to make the service is better by making sure your videos have audio, but I think that is pretty clear. But I just wanted to make sure I was exhaustive there,” he said.
I got tricycle ads within an hour after discussing tricycles with someone in person, not phone. I even tweeted about it a few days ago. (And, why should I get to see tricycle ads when I’ve not even searched for it online or wrote a mail or texted about it even once in my life?) https://t.co/38422gtQFH Jayanta Bhattacharya (@goldenarcher) April 10,2018
The speculation that Facebook hears to its users through microphone is doing rounds for the last two years. It originated in web forums and on Reddit but since then a lot of people have come forwards with anecdotal evidence saying that Facebook listens to their conversations. For example, on during the hearing, the senator who asked the question said that he found about the issue from his staffers who claimed they saw ads based on their real-life conversations.
However it needs to be said that these have always been anecdotal evidence and so far no smoking gun, no cleverly hidden code, no secret setting in the Facebook software has been found. Also, Facebook has officially denied several times that it doesn’t listen to people’s conversations.
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