Facebook's initial foray into the app/mic biz was troubled and their statement was "we only listen for popular music / TV in the background in order to help you." It also came out that they mine personal messages between users.
"I’m not paranoid to think they are listening to the microphone but the coincidence is super uncanny."
We need to get past the block where we label people as paranoid for thinking these big corps might invade user's privacy.
I've seen the myth that Facebook is targeting ads based on what it hears debunked several times. Do you have a source that shows that it is in fact listening?
I think it's more likely that the same reason someone is talking about something (they're in a demographic interested in that thing) is the reason that Facebook gives you ads for that thing. Add in the Baader-Meinhof effect and it seems like Facebook is listening to your conversations.
Let's say Facebook NEVER listens to you... I'm 100% on board with them and their honesty. It still doesn't matter.
If you let ANY third party app listen to you, and identify you, for example the latest Candy Crush game, then your information along with preferences are being uploaded to databases for re-targeting.
When I do a big campaign in Facebook, or any sophisticated marketer does, I don't ask Facebook for users who like Cats and are looking for brands of organic cat food. I PROVIDE them a pre-vetted list of people looking for cat food that I generated and the emails associated with those Facebook accounts.
Facebook has NO WAY to know how I came up with my list, and no possible way to find out. It could have been from listening to conversations while someone played Candy Crush, or it could have been from a form submitted on my website.
One of these days I'm just going to actually document myself doing this and publish it to a website so more people understand what is happening and how easy it is to use data from people's conversations.
TLDR: Any time you buy a list of potential customers from a market research company, that data could have been gathered with conversation tracking. It's not Facebook's fault, it's just the reality.
Thinking about it, I might just remove it from Google as well since I don't really use voice search.
I just double-checked, and I have mine turned off. So, "requires"?
Evidence? Every time someone claims this it gets debunked.
Of course I realized shortly thereafter: "Do I really want better targeted ads on my Instagram feed?"
It's a little too late now but if I had to do it over again I would let it guess, mostly poorly, and that makes it easier to filter out the sponsored content.
I ask this because in that infamous Forbes article about Target and the pregnant girl they mention how they now add ads for things they don't think you are interested in, in an effort to creep people out less. (To me this feels a little worse) Plenty of groups do purposefully send false hits to make it less creepy to the target.
It was at its best when you could follow accounts, all of the posts of the people you follow would be displayed chronologically, and clicking on a hashtag would also display all posts under that tag chronologically.
Facebook removed the chronological order of the timeline, made it so you will not see all posts from the people you follow, started injecting posts and ads from accounts I do not follow, and did the same with hashtags where you will only see posts facebook decides you should see via their algorithm. Also, engagement with my page decreased 100-500% across the board and my consistent growth stopped entirely as I was not an "influencer" so people that followed me and checked my hashtags would rarely even see my posts
Facebook changed Instagram from an extremely functional social app that allowed you to easily interact with and become parts of niche communities, to a useless ad platform that limits your interactivity and connectivity to anything that you actually want to see to push you to whoever pays Facebook or whatever the algorithm decides what should be popular which ends up being the same garbage content that has plagued Facebook for years
There’s several large magazines that are 50% ad content. I bet that’s the ceiling.
Second post is always an ad. There’s an ad before they tell you you’re all caught up. And it looks like followed tags effect that ratio as well.
If you go above 50% ads, some print pages will be ads on both sides, and both may easily be ripped out and discarded--the earliest ad-blocker tech.
Pretty quickly I figured out that articles by Steven J Vaughan-Nichols were worth reading and the rest were generally not. But the ads were what we were looking for.
The PWA version is almost as good as the native app. It lacks a pull to refresh feature as far as I can tell, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I regularly use Firefox Focus (which is also the system wide content blocker for me), but it doesn't seem like its blocking rules are updated often. Not sure if that's because of some limit in the number of rules allowed per blocking extension.
Maybe that’s a feature for some though.
So maybe that tricked the system? My only other theory would be that they somehow know I wouldn't use the service at all if it had ads. I'm a fickle user who happens to produce some quality, original artwork for their service.
I don't mind terribly if there are a few sponsored posts in any of my social media feeds. I suspect the acceptable rate is somewhere around one per five original content posts.