![]() These data brokers also manage the majority of loyalty programs in grocery stores and major pharmacy chains, which means they don’t need you to pay for things with a credit card in order to know what you’re buying.įacebook had more than 52,000 ad-targeting categories that users could belong in, Angwin explained, including typical “interest” categories for Adele fans and Nascar enthusiasts, but also sorting people by which decade their homes were built in, whether their families drank a lot of iced tea, and if they thought they might have dissociative identity disorder. Consumer credit reporting agencies - like, for example, the now-notorious Equifax - have files that include things like your income, your marital status, your legal history, “the square footage of your house within 25 square feet,” and so on. Then they spoke to ProPublica investigative journalist Julia Angwin, who explained that Facebook can quite easily supplement its own data about your online behavior with purchasable data about your offline behavior. Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress in April. Martínez had no qualms about explaining the murkier capabilities of Facebook ad targeting, yet he denied that the company could listen to you. Most notably, he created Facebook Pixel, which is essentially a piece of code that can be put on virtually any website, allowing Facebook to collect information about what you do there - which items you look at and click, what kinds of things you spend time reading, what you almost buy but don’t quite buy, etc. They spoke to former Facebook engineer Antonio García Martínez, who more or less launched the ad-targeting division of the company. Vogt attempted to debunk a whole batch of anecdotes about Facebook and Instagram “listening” through users’ phones - submitted by listeners to their popular internet culture podcast Reply All. Last November, reporters Alex Goldman and P.J. (Both relevant only if Mark Zuckerberg’s word means anything to you.) Gary Peters posed the question to Mark Zuckerberg point-blank, and he said, “No,” in front of all of Congress. ![]() Not all these coincidences can be explained - at least not in a way that will make you feel betterįacebook published an official denial of this practice on its company blog in June 2016, which reads in part: “Facebook does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed.” More recently, Michigan Sen. Still, there are perennial personal “investigations” into the question, and dozens of Reddit threads, and hundreds of news hits: Do our phones listen to our conversations on behalf of advertisers? And does Facebook help them? We know that Facebook and Google and Apple have a lot to lose if it ever came out that they are recording us through our phones, and even though we try not to think about it, most of us also know that they have already gained more data about us than can possibly ever be parsed or used without accessing our microphones. “It’s striking that everyone assumes clandestine listening instead of coincidence - and that the actual targeting data used is likely creepier than simply listening,” he noted, before conceding to a reader that he (or any other reporter) can’t explain exactly how all this targeting works. ![]() ![]() I had mostly forgotten this happened, until seeing my former boss, Verge editor Nilay Patel, tweet about how many of these stories he had listened to over the recent holiday weekend. Obviously, her phone was listening to her. Then, in my kitchen, scrolling through (Facebook-owned) Instagram, my friend screamed and pointed to an ad for a beer she had never tried, never read about, never heard of, never purchased, barely even held in her hand long enough to read its label out loud just one time, 15 minutes before. We idly showed a few of them to each other, put them back, and got a six-pack of Stella Artois. The store had dozens of options of craft beers and ciders in weird flavors, from obscure breweries we had never heard of. Three years ago, on the way to my apartment in Brooklyn to cook dinner for myself and a friend, we stopped into a grocery store that offered build-your-own six-packs of beer. ![]()
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