"It
happened to me in a pub with mates," the 98FM DJ told me. "We were
chatting and an odd topic came up, alpacas. I'd never Googled it or looked it
up. The next thing, I start seeing ads for alpaca farms in my feed."
Dubliner
Jeremy Dixon is convinced. Our phones are being secretly used as tools by
Facebook and Instagram to record our physical conversations, which are then
mined for ads which we see when we open our social apps.
'I
know this is happening. No one can tell me otherwise. I've experienced it and
so have friends."
Jeremy
is not alone. The theory that Facebook, Google, Amazon and other big online
tech companies are secretly listening to our conversations through the
microphones on our handsets is rife.
As
a technology reporter, it's the most consistent question I've received over the
last three years.
"Is
my phone spying on me?"
"How
on earth can something someone said to me suddenly turn up in my ads?"
"I'm
not one for conspiracy theories, but it's just too big a coincidence."
"Let
me tell you about the ad I saw after talking to my mam the other day…"
Repeated,
explicit denials from Facebook, up to and including its chief executive Mark
Zuckerberg, cut no ice. For some, the timing between what we just talked about
and the ad we're now suddenly seeing is just too suspicious.
"They're
tracking our location and lots of other stuff," says Alan Smeaton,
Professor of Computing at Dublin City University. "It's not hard to
imagine that they're doing more. Our trust in companies like Facebook is
decreasing."
Everyone,
from the Irish data protection commissioner to the US Senate to those inside
Facebook's Irish office, says that to listen in on us secretly would be
unethical and illegal.
But
does that actually mean it's not happening?
Hard
proof is difficult to find.
"Technically,
they could do it," says Dublin-based Patricia Scanlon, founder of SoapBox
Labs and one of the leading artificial intelligence and voice technology
experts in the industry. "I don't think they would reap the economic
benefits from the amount it would cost them to do it, technically speaking. But
they have the capability to gather snippets throughout the day if they really
wanted to."
So
the Irish Independent decided to run a carefully calibrated test with seven of
our journalists (including this reporter).
Each
journalist was given a script that contained specific trigger words. They then
read the script out loud directly in front of their phones, making sure that
the 'microphone' setting on their Facebook and Instagram apps was switched on.
A week of monitoring their social media ads ensued.
To
enhance the test, the trigger words chosen have nothing to do with our test
subjects' current lives or online searches.
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