- Alright, we're going to do it.
We're going to talk about Facebook,
and the fact that lot of you think
the company company is listening to your conversations,
even when you aren't using the app.
Like, the one time my friend
mentioned a random musical to me,
and I saw an ad for it in my Instagram feed
later that night.
Facebook owns Instagram, by the way,
if you weren't aware.
I don't even go to musicals,
so this was a super weird ad for me to see.
Which leads me to the question
is Facebook tapping our microphones
to listen in on everything we say,
to then, serve us ads.
- Yes or no.
Does Facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices
to enrich personal information about it's users?
- No.
- While I believe that Facebook
isn't listening to our conversations,
it has previously screwed up user privacy,
particularly, with it's Cambridge Analytica scandal.
So it's always good to be skeptical
of what the company says and what it does.
Every expert I talked to for this video
believes Facebook isn't listening.
Actual evidence proves it isn't, too.
But the scary thing is you produce so much data
that Facebook probably doesn't even need your microphone
to learn everything about you.
Now, let's dive in.
To answer whether Facebook is tapping your microphone,
we need to answer two main things.
One, is it even technically feasible
for Facebook to tap billions of people's microphones
and parse all their voice data
to then determine who is speaking
and about what and to.
Why would they want to do this, anyway,
and would it really be that lucrative?
On the technical side,
yes, it is totally possible for Facebook
to manage this voice data.
Nigel Cannings, a co-founder and CTO
of the company called Intelligent Voice,
says all that's really needed to parse voice data
is serious processing power,
which Facebook likely has.
- All of the technology exists today.
It would be a very feasible technical challenge
for a large tech company to undertake.
- And figuring out what you're saying is super easy.
- What's been said
and what it means are extremely simple.
- Determining who's talking varies in difficulty,
depending on the circumstances.
Like, if you're calling from your Facebook account,
it's pretty easy to figure out who's speaking
and attribute that data to that specific person.
- The ability to distinguish me
as a British male of a particular age
just from my voice is very simple.
And to distinguish you
as an American woman of a particular age
is pretty simple.
- For example, Facebook could easily tell
that I'm the one talking about Oreos or whatever else
if I'm calling someone from my Facebook account.
However, a stray microphone conversation
isn't as easy to attribute,
and this is what most people are probably worried about.
Let's say you're having lunch with a friend
and at least 20 other people are around you.
Facebook would probably struggle
to figure out who's talking.
Cannings says the company would likely need
additional metadata to narrow the field.
It could easily determine the age
and sex of the person talking just from their voice.
So if it could also figure out geolocation data,
which Facebook and Instagram collect,
it could then get closer to figuring out
which user is talking.
If Facebook set up a specific geo-fence,
it could even further narrow its options
by identifying everyone else in the area,
and then matching voice data up against its user base.
- We're spewing geolocation data all the time.
So if I could narrow it down to,
say, a thousand people in the particular geo-fence,
then, if you we're recording something on your phone,
I've got access to that.
And I also knew the biometric profiles
of the other thousand people in that geo-fence,
I could do a pretty good job of working out that it was you.
- But Facebook is a massive platform with billions of users.
If you're in a dense city like New York,
with me and millions of other residents,
this would likely be a difficult task.
In a small town, it'd probably be possible,
but also would require a decent amount of work
just to figure out how to target you with ads.
- If I was trying to match it against
the hundred million or billion other people on my platform,
then, no, I couldn't.
So it's still a matter of scale.
The ability to do one
to many matchings on biometrics exists,
but the more people you throw into the pot,
the less accurate it becomes.
- Alright.
So let's say Facebook could listen to
and recognize individuals.
Does it actually need to?
If the company isn't listening in like it says,
then, how are we all getting such scary on point ads?
Is voice data even worth collecting?
- I actually think that voice data
probably gives up more information about ourselves
than most any other sort of data.
Because not only have you got the contents of what's said,
you've also got a very rich seam of emotionally content
that goes with it, as well.
- Facebook has access
to something even better than voice data,
everything else that you do.
I called Andres Arrieta, the Tech Products Manager
at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
to chat about Facebook's tracking technology.
- They have so much data on us
that they don't need to turn on the microphone.
- Let's run through the things
Facebook likely already knows about us.
It knows your location because of where you say you live,
but also the location tracking permissions
you give the company's app.
It knows your self-identified demographics,
what you look like because of the photos you upload,
your family members and friends,
and, crucially, your browsing habits.
Facebook uses its ad tracking technology,
called the Facebook Pixel,
to follow you around the web
and keep tabs on wherever you end up.
This pixel, which website owners can build onto their sites,
helps advertisers figure out
if their Facebook ads have been successful.
Oh, and you know those Like buttons
you see on every single website?
Those track you, too.
Facebook has even been able
to identify user's sexual preferences
based on the sites they visit.
That's how the company
accidentally outed gay users to advertisers years ago.
- This goes much more further
than just uploading a simple profile
and showing you what type of beer
or what motorcycle you want to buy.
This is about your really, really personal relationships
and things that you might have not shared with others.
- Facebook tracks user's IRL purchase history, too.
- They do buy your credit history.
We tend to think of online tracking
as something that is contained online,
but it's no longer contained online.
They're putting all these other sources,
online and offline,
together to reveal our complete lives.
- It uses this data in the aggregate
to anonymously verify that it's ads actually drive sales up.
Suffice it to say, the company knows a lot about you.
You can witness ad trackers in the wild through plugins
like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Privacy Badger,
which shows all the third party trackers
keeping tabs on you.
It says The Verge has more than one hundred trackers,
which is kind of not a good look for us,
but you also don't pay us for this content.
And that's why Arrieta thinks
Facebook isn't listening to our conversations.
But, if you require more hard evidence,
the EFF even proved that the company wasn't listening to us
in a news segment with CBS
where it monitored traffic from a user's phone.
It didn't see any audio recordings going to Facebook.
Andres thinks that maybe people notice ads more
after they've talked about a specific topic.
- Most of the time, it's because
we sometimes actually don't pay attention to the ads.
And it's totally possible
that that ad had been playing before,
but because it's such a small brand, you never noticed.
- I know that possible explanation isn't totally satisfying,
but in some ways, it's scarier.
Facebook knows everything about you
without needing your microphone.
If you're concerned about ad tracking,
and Facebook in particular,
you could delete your account,
which also means deleting WhatsApp and Instagram.
Sorry about it.
You could also try an ad tracking extension
like Privacy Badger,
which lets you turn off ad trackers.
Arrieta suggests using different browsers
and diversifying where you search
so that companies can't build a complete profile of you.
You could also enable Do Not Track in your browser
which asks websites to not track you.
They don't have to honor your request, though.
Generally, we all have to come to terms
with the fact that ads power the internet.
It's reality at this point.
And until we start paying for every service,
or we drastically rethink ad technology,
we're stuck with it.
Maybe I'll put a love ya in there, too.
Just for-- - [Woman] Love ya.
- Love ya (laughs).
- [Woman] Yeah, all of those.
- Alright, so let's say Facebook could.
- (laughs) Sorry.
- Lauren Grush (laughs).
- Blame Angela, she puts (laughs).