New Court Documents Reignite Debate: Does Facebook Use Your Phone's Mic To Eavesdrop On You?
Some conspiracy theories are easily debunked: that President Obama was born in Kenya, that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, that Melania Trump has a doppelgänger appearing at official White House events. (We hope you don't believe in any of those.)
Other conspiracy theories are harder to dismiss out of hand — like the idea that Facebook and other tech giants use the microphone on your smartphone to listen in on your conversations and then serve you ads relevant to your interests.
Update, May 24, 2018, 11:17 AM: New Court Documents
The theory has been around for awhile, but this week, newly released court documents added an official legal allegation of mic eavesdropping among other surveillance techniques to internet chatter.
In a California lawsuit, former startup Six4Three alleges that Facebook collected text messages, locations and photos of people who had not signed up for the social network through their friends' use of Facebook's phone app.
Included in the allegations is the claim that Facebook accessed and recorded data from people's microphones and worked on a project to remotely activate Bluetooth, allowing location tracking without explicit consent.
Six4Three's original suit with Facebook was over the company's decision to remove the company's access to friends' data. Their app, Pikinis, went through friends' photos to find ones containing swimsuits. Facebook's decision effectively killed this feature. Facebook claims that its decision falls under its free speech rights. It has previously asserted that it is a platform, not a publisher.
Previous Controversy
The idea that Facebook has been mic eavesdropping was also widely discussed in October when PJ Vogt, one of the hosts of the popular internet-culture podcast Reply All, put out a call for evidence that Facebook "uses your mic to spy on you for ad reasons," eliciting an outpouring of responses.
Anecdotal Evidence
The strongest evidence for this theory is the many, many, many anecdotes of people seeing ads about things they claim they have only ever discussed verbally. In response to Vogt's call for stories, people described seeing ads for everything from cat food…
… to "snacking chocolate" …
… to famous a cappella groups…
… to toilet-paper-holders that also have a little platform for your phone.
A video showing a couple's successful attempt to get Facebook to show them cat food ads by talking constantly about cat food (even though they don't have a cat) went viral last summer, and recently made the rounds on Reddit again.
These are just a drop in the ocean of suspicious stories about conversation-related Facebook ads around the internet.
The other evidence that this conspiracy theory could be true is that it's apparently quite easy to create apps that listen in on conversations. Last summer, the BBC asked a cybersecurity expert named Ken Munro to build a prototype app that listened in on its owners conversations, and he easily built an app that didn't drain the phone's battery while listening in within a couple of days.
"All we did was use the existing functionality of Google Android – we chose it because it was a little easier for us to develop in," said Mr Munro.
"We gave ourselves permission to use the microphone on the phone, set up a listening server on the internet, and everything that microphone heard on that phone, wherever it was in the world, came to us and we could then have sent back customised ads."
[BBC]
So in addition to all the first-person stories about suspicious ads, there's evidence that smartphone settings can be easily circumvented to allow surreptitious spying. In short, once you start down this particular online rabbit hole, you will find it difficult to dismiss this particular conspiracy theory as totally crazy.
Facebook's Denials
The best evidence against the theory that Facebook spies on your IRL conversations is that Facebook strenuously denies it. Last summer, the company put out a statement asserting in no uncertain terms that it never uses microphones in any inappropriate way.
Facebook does not use your phone's microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed. Some recent articles have suggested that we must be listening to people's conversations in order to show them relevant ads. This is not true. We show ads based on people's interests and other profile information – not what you're talking out loud about.
We only access your microphone if you have given our app permission and if you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio.
[Facebook]
In response to Vogt's request for stories, Facebook's vice president of advertising, called the theory "Just not true."
So why do so many people feel like they're being served ads about things they've only had conversations about? One theory is that the ads have always been there, but people only start noticing them after they've talked about them.
One theory is that it could be people experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which is also known as frequency illusion or recency illusion. It's part of a cognitive bias (a tendency to think in a certain way, which may deviate from a typical logical way of reaching a conclusion or making a decision) in which something we've heard about recently seems to appear more often in our lives than ever before, as it's suddenly in every direction we look. Like cat food.
The Bottom Line
Look, we know this is unsatisfying, but at the moment we don't have a smoking gun one way or the other. So it comes down to who you believe: thousands of people with compelling anecdotes and Six4Three, or a notoriously secretive social media giant? (We don't mean for that to be a leading question, we swear — anecdotes are still just anecdotes.) Until someone (like the Reply All guys!) gets to the bottom of this mystery, we suspect the conspiracy theory will continue to flourish — and people will be careful about what they say in front of their smartphones.