Is Facebook eavesdropping on our conversations?
ANSWER: Taken at face value with little understanding about how targeted digital advertising has evolved, it would be easy to draw the conclusion that big tech companies are spying on us by listening to our conversations. Advertising technology has gone from "if youre interested in this item, youre probably also interested in this item" to highly predictive targeting based on the enormous number of data points sites track every single second of the day. Its technically impractical  Facebook has roughly 2.85 billion active users a month, so in order to listen to everyones conversations 24/7 for advertising purposes, it would require an enormous amount of processing power and storage that would be cost-prohibitive. My back of the napkin estimate is that it would generate roughly 4 exabytes of audio data per day, which translates to 4 million terabytes per day that would have to be processed rather quickly for this conspiracy to be true. Facebook would also have to figure out how to keep such a huge program under wraps. It would take a large number of programmers and hardware techs to make this all work, with no one ever leaking anything about the project. They dont need to listen to your conversations  The sad fact is that Facebook has so many ways to predict which ads might resonate with you that are more efficient than figuring out how to listen to everyones conversations. When an advertiser creates an ad campaign on Facebook, they start by listing out the age, gender, location, interests, etc. of their target customer. This information is just the beginning of how you become a target of a specific ad. Lets take a scenario where someone you recently met told you about a new product they are using and how much they love it in casual conversation. That person has obviously made it known to the advertising world that they have an interest in the product because they searched for it and in this case, purchased it  Ongoing location-based tracking indicates that you and this person were in the same location together. If you fit the demographics for the product, an ad will likely be delivered to you in the near future because the systems know you were just in contact with someone who liked the product. This is just a simple example of the AI used to predict ads, which is exponentially more sophisticated. Its been there all along  There's another possibility that doesn't require much imagination, because we're bombarded with ads throughout the day. The product was being advertised to you for a while, but because youre exposed to an estimated 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day, you didnt really "see" the ad until the item came up in conversation. Disabling Facebooks mic access  If none of this convinces you, try disabling access to the mic for the Facebook and Messenger apps in your phones privacy/app permissions setting. Keep in mind you wont be able to participate in any voice-related Facebook activities if you do this. nd Im quite certain that the creepy ads wont stop showing up either. Ken Colburn is founder and CEO of Data Doctors Computer Services, datadoctors.com. Ask any tech question at facebook.com/DataDoctors or on Twitter @TheDataDoc.