The original article is behind a paywall at 404media.
In a pitch deck to prospective customers, one of Facebook’s alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users’ smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.
As 404 Media reports based on documents leaked to its reporters, the TV and radio news giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its so-called “Active Listening” software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.”
“Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the deck continues.
In the same slideshow, CMG counted Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients of its “Active Listening” service. After 404 reached out to Google about its partnership, the tech giant removed the media group from the site for its “Partners Program,” which prompted Meta, the owner of Facebook, to admit that it is reviewing CMG to see if it violates any of its terms of service.
An Amazon spokesperson, meanwhile, told 404 that its Ads arm "has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so. The spox added, confusingly, that if one of its marketing partners violates its rules, the company will take action.
We would never listen to your mics, our gos are just that good…
Trust us bro.
Well we always accused Meta of listening. If it was their partners, they technically weren’t lying when they said they weren’t. “we don’t need to listen to you” was technically correct too, it just missed one word: “we don’t need to listen to you ourselves”
Technically, this is why I assume corpos are lying 100% of the time unless proven otherwise.
Bad faith actors should not get benefit of the doubt yet we have adult people calling others tech illiterate or conspiracy theorists because they report this experience…
Looks like at least sometimes they were not making it up lol