In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention
In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention
One of Facebook's alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users' smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.
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I highly doubt that they actually managed to do this, at least any time recently.
As another commenter noted, Android alerts you when an app is accessing the microphone in the background, and it would also absolutely destroy the phones battery life more than the FB app currently does. The only way that we have the "Hey Google/Siri" command prompts active all the time is with custom hardware not available to the apps, and certainly not without Android knowing about it.
Maybe they actively listen while the app is open, but even then I think recent Android/iOS would let you know about that.
Google's "Now playing" feature constantly listens to what's going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song "fingerprints". The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: "...Now Playing is protected by Android's Private Compute Core..."
I'm not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.