It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you. Or if they’re co-opting the microphone feature in your phone to listen to what you’re talking about and then push similarly-themed ads on you.
Is Facebook actually doing this? They say no after a mass communications professor at the University of South Florida, Kelli Burns, told The Independent that she’s afraid the massive social media power is indeed listening.
Professor Burns has said that the tool appears to be using the audio it gathers not simply to help out users, but might be doing so to listen in to discussions and serve them with relevant advertising. She says that to test the feature, she discussed certain topics around the phone and then found that the site appeared to show relevant ads.
Again, the company denies the claim, saying that “Facebook does not use microphone audio to inform advertising or News Feed stories in any way. Businesses are able to serve relevant ads based on people’s interests and other demographic information, but not through audio collection.”
Facebook added that it only has access to a user’s microphone if given explicit permission to do so by the user. Whether or not that’s true, the best solution would seem to be to go into your settings and disable the microphone’s connection to Facebook. Will that solve the problem? One would hope so. Because if it doesn’t, the problem becomes that much bigger.
(via Engadget)
