Many people claim that after speaking about something, Facebook or Instagram shows them ads about that very same thing. Tech folks deny this is happening. This question will resolve to yes if Meta admits that they were using the iPhone mic to harvest keywords for better targeted advertising. This revelation must come before the end of 2025 and they must admit to this being done before 2024. If a major news source breaks the story and Meta denies it but it's fairly clear from folks like WSJ, NYT, etc that this will soon come to light, that will also count and the question will resolve to yes.
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You don’t need the iPhone mic to hear what people are saying. You can use the mic of the nearest smart TV.
I think much of this is (a) clever priming with subtile adds that make people think about a predictable related product soon after, (b) good predictive algorithms in general, (c) conformation bias. (a) and (b) seem legally a lot safer than using the iPhone mic.
Btw., what about a mic on a non-Apple phone?
I've seen this happen countless times, with ads that I would never receive or look at, after discussing something with someone. I used to think it was all confirmation bias, but the number of times it's happened means its either using the phone mic, or using my friends google searches to identify me.
This seems like just confirmation bias.
I don't think Meta would even consider implementing this. If it were to be implemented, then I'd expect that fact to have already been discovered through network traffic analysis, reverse engineering and/or being leaked by Meta employees. I would also expect Meta to be vague about whether it's possible, rather than explicitly denying it.
The question would require this to become public in the next ~2 years to resolve YES, while this conspiracy theory has already existed for at least 7 years. I'd bet this down to <1% if I had enough money.