National Post (National Edition)
Ssssh, Facebook may be listening
Whistleblower adds to claims of eavesdropping
It has been a rumour that has been around for quite a while: Facebook is listening to you through your smartphone.
And now Canadian whistleblower Christopher Wylie has appeared to confirm it — sort of.
Wylie appeared in front of a committee of British parliamentarians on Tuesday, and in his nearly four hours of testimony, he used words like “fraud” and “cheat” to describe the use of Facebook data to affect the outcomes of Brexit. But he also addressed the longstanding internet theory that Facebook spies on its users to shape their advertising.
Last year, a YouTube video of a man claiming Facebook gave him cat food ads because of a conversation with his girlfriend went viral. And the eavesdropping claims are regularly discussed on social media.
Conservative MP Damian Collins, who chaired the committee, asked Wylie if the rumours are true.
“There’s been various speculation about the fact that Facebook can, through the Facebook app on your smartphone, listen in to what people are talking about and discussing and using that to prioritize the advertising as well,” Collins said. “Other people would say, no, they don’t think it’s possible. It’s just that the Facebook system is just so good at predicting what you’re interested in that it can guess.”
Wylie said he was only speculating, but that Facebook and other apps can listen in and figure out the context of where you are based on the sounds in your environment. It picks up whether your TV is on, or if you’re at work or at home based on “environmental context,” he said. “There’s audio that could be useful just in terms of, are you in an office environment, are you outside, are you watching TV, what are you doing right now?” Wylie said.
But this data is used to target ads based on your location, not listen to your conversations, he explained.
“It’s not to say they’re listening to what you’re saying. It’s not natural language processing. That would be hard to scale. But to understand the environmental context of where you are to improve the contextual value of the ad,” he said.
Wylie emphasized it would be a better question for Facebook.
The social media giant has repeatedly denied using people’s microphones to target ads or tailor users’ news feeds.
“Facebook does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed,” Facebook said in a statement in 2016. “Articles have suggested that we must be listening to people’s conversations in order to show them relevant ads. This is not true. We show ads based on people’s interests and other profile information — not what you’re talking out loud about.”
Facebook also said that its app only accesses the microphone on a smartphone if the user gave it permission to do so, and only if the user is using a feature that requires audio, for example, if they are recording a video.
Last October, Facebook’s vice president of ads addressed the rumour again.
“I run ads product at Facebook. We don’t — and have never — used your microphone for ads. Just not true,” Rob Goldman tweeted.
But as privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye, who was at the hearing, points out, Facebook’s “opaque” practices mean there’s no telling how much data users hand over.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced it redesigned its settings to make privacy options easier to find, but made no changes to the policy itself.