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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2235 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

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By now that claim about smartphones passively listening in 24/7 for ad targeting is quite old. Any conclusive evidence either for or against?

My cousin works for Verizon and says no. He says that what's going on is that Facebook is just showing you the same ads as your friends, which could happen if they search for something you were talking about and you don't. There's selection bias here, too; nobody accounts for all the times they talked about something and weren't shown an ad for it.

So this was my stance for the longest time, but I've had a few instances like the following that are just too suspicious:

I do not have Facebook on my phone. I was talking to someone at work whose number I do not have, he was talking about the problems in a vacation destination I have never gone to in a country I was last in before Facebook existed, I was not considering going there so I had not been googling anything about it (we were talking about it because of a patient mentioning it), he was not considering going there either, just explaining that he thought it was ass.

Then when I went home I got advertisements for hotel rooms in that city. I do not regularly get hotel advertisements.

Facebook shouldn't have had anything to cue off of.

Presumably Facebook knows my phone number, detected it in proximity to his phone number, and served a targeted ad. It's possible that he furiously googling the place afterwards and it served similar ads to people in his phone book and people with recent text messages etc but that's nearly just as bad.

Facebook shouldn't have had anything to cue off of.

Except the data that the FB / Messenger app transmitted, whatever sites had FB pixel, anything you accessed (voluntarily or in the background) that communicates with FB and so on.

There is simply no mechanism for the FB app to listen to the microphone of your phone because the phone OS just won't stream audio to it unless explicitly enabled (including the visible indicator etc). To do that FB would have to abuse a zero day exploit in the phone OS for years without anyone catching on.

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