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.

I assume this only includes times when you aren't recordin audio / video to upload to instagram, as basing ads on transcripts of those is probably happening and isn't the controvery here

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