[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.