Facebook did the sneaky listening thing, too

You'll commonly hear these stories brushed off with, "these companies have so much metadata on you that they can know what you'll look for before you do."

I don't buy it - at least not fully. There are too many stories of totally random stuff talked about showing up in feeds to make this excuse totally plausible.

Hell, it was less than a year ago that you'd get brushed off with, "no, people aren't listening to the things you're saying to your home device, it's only run through NLP."

I would suspect, that if facebook were listening, someone, somewhere would have some amount of evidence. A reverse engineered binary, an emulated program, something making a visible call to a microphone and hashing the words or something.

Based on google being able to identify what song is playing in the room my phone is in, while my phone is in airplane mode, I suspect facebook COULD have a list of a million brand words stored on the phone and their corresponding representation, and tally as you say them and report the tally back, without ever sending the audio itself off the phone. But I would think, after all this suspicion, someone would have some amount of actual evidence of the process itself, and not just the results.

Zuckerberg said the answer was NO in front of congress. That would be a pretty bold lie.

No, none of these apps use your microphone to listen in on you. This has been stated many times in official newsroom posts, and in front of Congress.

It has been disproven countless times by simply looking at network traffic of the apps.

This is simply a version of the Birthday problem. You consider 100 things during any particular day. Facebook shows you 20 targeted ads in your newsfeed. It'd be a statistical anomaly if they were wrong about every single one of their choices. By pure random chance they're likely to get at least one right every once in a while.