Here's the story: in December 2023 it emerged that Cox Media Group had a rogue ad sales group who had been capitalizing on the widely believed conspiracy theory that "Facebook apps listen to your phone's microphone and target ads based on it" - by pitching that in vague, confusing terms to their potential ad customers.
The moment this started getting wider coverage they deleted all mentions of it from their site, and any media organization who contacted Cox were told words to this effect:
> CMG businesses do not listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement. We regret any confusion and we are committed to ensuring our marketing is clear and transparent.
That's from https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/29/cox-caught-again-braggin... but there are plenty more like it if you search the web for "CMG businesses do not listen to any conversations".
My translation of the above: one of our ad sales teams was misleading potential customers and we told them to stop.
The only thing that's new this week is that 404media got hold of the pitch deck PDF that Cox Media Group had been using back when they were pulling this scam - you can see that document here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25051283-cmg-pitch-d...
Read that deck and your "this is a total scam" senses should be ringing loudly.
The problem is... convincing anyone who thinks that this is happening is basically impossible.
"Facebook spied on my through my microphone and showed me ads, I know they did because I talked about a holiday in Croatia out loud and saw an advert for a hotel in Crotia few minutes later"
This doesn't account for the thousands of times they had a conversation about a holiday and did NOT see an advert for a relevant product a few minutes later. It only takes one coincidence for people to be convinced this is happening, and no amount of denials or appeal to rationality (battery life, too-many-people-in-on-the-conspiracy, phones don't let apps just listen without showing a visual indicator, etc etc etc) will convince them otherwise.
There's a great podcast episode about how hard it is to talk people out of this from 2017! https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/z3hlwr