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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
- There's a widely held belief that Facebook uses smartphones to listen in on users, and then serve those users advertisements based on their speech.
- Facebook has repeatedly denied doing as much.
- Despite those denials from Facebook, and evidence from experts to the contrary, the belief is widely held and seemingly unshakable.
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There you were, talking to Gina about a potential trip this fall to Buenos Aires. "Maybe I'll go to Buenos Aires this fall!" you said. "Or maybe Lisbon! Who knows!"
Hours later, idly scrolling through Facebook and - what's that? An ad for vacationing in Lisbon? How could it have known?
It's perhaps too familiar of a story at this point. A cliché. "Facebook is listening to my conversations!" you tell Gina. "I know it." And she's sympathetic. Maybe she even has her own story about something very similar happening to her.
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The belief that Facebook is listening to users through their smartphones, then serving ads based on that spying, is extremely pernicious.
It crosses generations, race, gender, and income brackets. Your conspiracy-minded uncle and members of Congress are on the same page for this one. Everyone, it seems, believes that Facebook is listening in on them.
And no matter how hard Facebook tries to tamp down that belief, it persists.