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In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention (futurism.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Meta does not use your phone's microphone for ads and we've been public about this for years," the statement read. "We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data."

Ah, yes. The tried and true defense of "we've denied it for years and continue to deny it" must be credible coming from a source as trustworthy as Facebook. I hear they're planning on holding a press conference to pinky swear they're not listening to the microphone they demand access to in order to show you ads that make them money.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 months ago (3 children)

FWIW, this was debunked when CMG originally made the claim. It was a marketing guy overselling their product and they had to correct their statement. They use the same info data brokers collect, and phones actively listening to you is not true.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

No it was quite a lot more than "a marketing guy" - there were pages and pages of details about their Active Listening program on their website, investor presentations etc. They went far into detail about how much they could listen to and what they could do with all that audio data.

Here's the Internet Archive link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231116115055/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/cmg-active-listening

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

The fundamental question is, “Do you trust Facebook?” They have the resources to manipulate the story and twist the truth. They have the capability to spy on you with mics, but they say they don’t do so. Do you trust them?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago

Even what they said could be true without applying to phones. They said "smart devices" a lot. They never said "smart phone".

There are a lot of IoT devices, some of which have microphones, a lot less secure than either iPhone or Android.