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Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

A longstanding conspiracy is the tale of how Facebook is listening in on your conversations, but the way it is actually serving you ads is much more unsettling.

In 2024 a big news story emerged purporting to finally offer the smoking gun evidence proving once and for all that private conversations are tracked by smartphones to tailor ads to individual users. Even the media outlet that broke the original story made a somewhat disingenuous link between the old microphone-ad conspiracy and this new revelation, referencing Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to US congress in April 2018 as if presenting a "gotcha" moment of catching him lying. The deeply disconcerting implication of all this is that the rich vein of data constantly being gathered can be crunched by an algorithm to essentially predict what you and your friends are talking about, and serve you an ad that is perfectly tailored to your current needs.

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