A hot potato: Many people's long-held belief that internet companies, especially Facebook/Meta, secretly record conversations to serve targeted ads is once again in the spotlight. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, has reiterated that this conspiracy theory is not true and explained why people often see ads for something they recently talked about.

The belief that smartphones surreptitiously listen to our spoken conversations to serve us targeted ads has been around almost as long as modern handsets; most people have experienced seeing an ad on social media for something they were recently talking about.

This practice has long been denied by companies, of course. In a video posted to Instagram, Mosseri listed several reasons why people think they're being spied on.

The Instagram boss said that, in addition to being a gross invasion of privacy, such recordings would drain a phone's battery and activate the microphone light.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

So, why do so many people believe it happens? Mosseri gave four possible reasons, the first being the most obvious: searching for the product or going on its website before the conversation takes place and simply forgetting about it.

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Mosseri notes that advertisers share information with social media platforms about who visited their sites, so these people can be targeted with ads. "So if you were looking at a product on a website, then that advertiser might have paid us to reach you with an ad."

Meta also shows ads based not only on what people are interested in, but also on what their friends and similar people are interested in, meaning there's a chance you'll be talking about something you were always going to see advertised.

There's also the chance that you might have seen the ad before 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," Mosseri added.

And finally, it could just be a random coincidence, which does happen.

Mosseri acknowledged that some people will always believe they're being recorded. But given that Meta this week announced it will soon use your conversations with its AI assistant to serve personalized ads, it seems the company doesn't really need to resort to spy-like tactics.

Back in 2017, Facebook's then-president of ads, Rob Goldman, said the platform doesn't and has never used phone microphones to serve ads. CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to repeat the denial to Congress a year later, while he was answering questions about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian election interference.

However, a 2023 pitch deck from Cox Media Group claimed its Active Listening program allowed targeting adverts based on the content of private conversations captured via microphones on smartphones, smart TVs, home assistants, and other devices. Some of the clients named in those materials included Google and Meta, though it never specified if they used the Active Listening tool. Cox later denied that it ever listened to users' conversations the way critics claimed, but Google still removed it as a partner.