Some Outfits Takes Pictures… Of Users
May 23, 2025
Conspiracy theorists aka wackadoos assert preach that the government is listening to everyone with microphones and it’s only gotten worse with mobile devices. This conspiracy theory has been running circuits since before the invention of the Internet. It used to be spies or aluminum can string telephones were the culprit. Truth is actually stranger than fiction and New Atlas updated an article about how well Facebook is actually listening to us, “Your Phone Isn’t Secretly Listening To You, But The Truth Is More Disturbing.”
Let’s assume that the story is accurate, but the information was on the Internet, so for AI and some humans, the write up is chock full of meaty facts. It was revealed in 2024 that Cox Media Group (CMG) developed Active Listening, a system to capture “real time intent data” with mobile devices’ microphones. It then did the necessary technology magic and fed personalized ads. Tech companies distanced themselves from CMG. CMG stopped using the system. It supposedly worked by listening to small vocal data uploaded after digital assistants were activated. It bleeds into the smartphone listening conspiracy but apparently that’s still not a tenable reality.
The mobile cyber security company Wandera tested the listening microphone theory. They placed two smart phones in a room, played pet food ads on an audio loop for thirty minutes a day over three days. Here are the nitty gritty details:
“User permissions for a large number of apps were all enabled, and the same experiment was performed, with the same phones, in a silent test room to act as a control. The experiment had two main goals. First, a number of apps were scanned following the experiment to ascertain whether pet food ads suddenly appeared in any streams. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the devices were closely examined to track data consumption, battery use, and background activity.”
The results showed that phones weren’t listening to conversations. The truth was on par and more feasible given the current technology:
“In early 2017 Jingjing Ren, a PhD student at Northeastern University, and Elleen Pan, an undergraduate student, designed a study to investigate the very issue of whether phones listen in on conversations without users knowing. Pretty quickly it became clear to the researchers that the phones’ microphones were not being covertly activated, but it also became clear there were a number of other disconcerting things going on. There were no audio leaks at all – not a single app activated the microphone,’ said Christo Wilson, a computer scientist working on the project. ‘Then we started seeing things we didn’t expect. Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.’”
There are multiple other ways Facebook and companies are actually tracking and collecting data. Everything done on a smartphone from banking to playing games generates data that can be tracked and sent to third parties. The more useful your phone is to you, the more useful it is as a tracking, monitoring, and selling tool to AI algorithms to generate targeted ads and more personalized content. It’s a lot easier to believe in the microphone theory because it’s easier to understand the vast amounts of technology at work to steal…er…gather information. To sum up, innovators are inspirational!
Whitney Grace, May 23, 2025
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