Today, the same day that Meta announced that it will soon use your AI chats to personalize the ads it shows you, Instagram head Adam Mosseri made a “myth busting” video attempting to set the record straight on a persistent rumor about Meta: “I swear, we do not listen to your microphone,” he says.
Meta’s ad targeting systems can be eerily precise, sometimes showing you things that you feel like you’ve only discussed in a verbal conversation and would only be possible for Meta to know about if it was listening through a device’s microphone. It’s a perception that Meta has been trying to push back on for years: • In 2016, the company, then known as Facebook, said that it “does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed.” • In a 2018 Senate hearin