No, Meta does not listen to you through your mobile: the CEO of Instagram debunks this urban legend

“We do not listen to you. We do not use the phone’s microphone to ease drop on you.” Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, has refuted one of the major rumors about Meta that has been circulating worldwide for years. In order to convince even the most skeptical, he has shared a series of reasons that may cause coincidences between the topics you discuss and the ads you see.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

Why you sometimes see ads about something you have recently discussed

First of all, Mosseri also wished to emphasize the fact that if they were spying on their users, “it would be a gross violation of privacy. You would drain your phone’s battery and you would notice and you would actually see a little light on the top of the creen letting you know that the microphone was on.”

Nevertheless, the CEO of Instagram is fully aware that these explanations are not sufficient to refute the theory that large technology companies such as Meta or Google access people’s devices to obtain information without their knowledge. Therefore, he has listed a series of scenarios to justify the fact that you may have seen an advertisement for a product that you had just discussed with someone. These are:

1. You may have searched for or clicked on that product on a website prior to your conversation

It is highly likely that you searched for the product in question previously and simply do not remember. The advertisers that work with Meta share information about which users visited their websites in order to try to target ads to those individuals on Meta’s platforms.

“So if you were looking at a product on a website that advertiser might have paid us to reach you with an ad,” Mosseri concludes. As you can see, this would be targeted advertising, not a highly sophisticated secret espionage technique.

2. Meta shows you ads based on your interests… so it may match your conversation topics

Instagram relies on your interests, your friends’ interests, and the interests of users with profiles similar to yours. “So it could be that you were talking to someone about a product and they before had actually looked for or searched for that product or that in general people with similar interests were doing the exact same thing.”

• You may also be interested in: Tanya O’Carroll versus Meta: a ruling against advertising on Facebook

3. You may have seen that ad several times but only realize it after talking about the product

Social networks bombard us with endless streams of stimuli, information, and content, which can cause us to forget much of what we have viewed by the end of the day. However, this does not mean that our subconscious has not registered some of this information, later surfacing at any moment.

This is precisely what Mosseri explained: “you might have actually seen that ad before you had the conversation and not realized it. We scroll quickly, we scroll by ads quickly and sometimes you internalize some of that and that actually affects what you talk about later.”

And these are the explanations given by Mosseri in an effort to put this topic to rest once and for all. Although, as he himself has acknowledged: “I know some of you are just not gonna believe me no matter how much i try to explain it.” What is your opinion on the matter?

Photo: Gemini