[cvwright]

You make a very good point. However, in this case there is very strong evidence that Facebook is also listening to the microphone.

Coincidentally, I recently had a friend convey a story where the Facebook app suddenly recommended a new connection immediately after certain information was spoken in a verbal conversation. This instance was particularly damning because, due to the sensitivity of the information that was spoken, it had been very carefully kept out of the digital footprint.

[Vinnl]

I consider it likely that this is merely just another example of people underestimating how much data they're leaking. I would wager to guess that there would have been far easier methods of deducing that new connection other than listening to your conversation and somehow inferring it from that stream of noise. You just don't know which, but it's not unimaginable that that certain information was leaked in another way as well, and probably in a more structured format than unlabelled audio.

[netsharc]

Maybe the other party looked the friend up.

Once Facebook recommended me to connect to guy with an interesting name, and I wondered where I saw this name before. I looked up my emails, and I saw that I bought something from him on eBay several years earlier. I know I never gave Facebook access to my mail account, but guess what, I'm pretty sure the guy gave access to his. Facebook saw that we sent mail to each other, and it asked me if I wanted to be FB friends with this random eBayer...

[rando444]

It's not unimaginable, but the frequency of these stories should make you wonder.

I had this happen personally. Had a conversation about my work with this girl I know which ended up being mostly about project management. The girl told me later she started getting ads for project management stuff.

It's not a subject she's interested in, has ever searched for information on, and has no relevance to her job working the counter at a sandwich shop. We have no social media accounts in common and don't even talk that often.

[corobo]

The issue is in the story teller. If the person telling the story doesn't understand what other data they're leaking or the data the people they interact with are leaking you cannot take their word that "Facebook is listening to my microphone" at face value, no matter how frequently they say it.

Also wouldn't a constant stream of audio - even low quality audio - ruin battery life? I realise it's a phone so it's base usage is a constant stream of audio but I can't help but feel that or something else would be giving it away.

As they have a bug bounty program I imagine there's plenty of people watching raw network activity between app and Facebook too.

[reaperducer]

>Also wouldn't a constant stream of audio - even low quality audio - ruin battery life?

Facebook is a well-known battery hog, at least on iOS. I can't imagine their devs are any better at Android.

[daemin]

Facebook probably knew because she was logged in to it on her work computer, where she was also searching for and reading project management websites. Since every website has a like button it means that Facebook can correlate the two.

[rando444]

This girl has zero interest in project management, the whole reason she brought it up to me is because she thought it was weird because it's a subject she never even thought of outside of the one conversation we had just prior to her being fed ads for the same thing.