Instagram chief denies mic-spying myth

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Instagram boss Adam Mosseri wants you to know: no, your phone isn’t secretly eavesdropping on your late-night ramen cravings. 

In a post this week, Mosseri attempted to debunk one of the internet’s longest-running conspiracy theories: that Meta turns on your microphone to serve creepily specific ads. 

He even admitted his own wife has asked if Instagram is “listening.”

The timing, though, is awkward. Meta just announced that it’ll soon start targeting ads using a fresh stream of data: how you interact with its AI products. 

Even if the mic isn’t on, Meta is still learning plenty about you, maybe more than you realize.

Most of us know the feeling: you chat about hiking boots, then suddenly an ad for trail gear appears in your feed. Coincidence? Witchcraft? Mark Zuckerberg? 

Mosseri insists it’s not microphones. Instead, he says, it’s Meta’s recommendation engine doing what it does best, using advertiser data and lookalike profiles to figure out what you’ll click. 

“If we were secretly recording you,” Mosseri added, “your battery would die, and you’d see your mic light on.” Comforting.

Meta has denied the mic-myth before. Zuck even swore under oath in Congress back in 2018. 

But this time, the company is rolling out a new privacy policy on December 16 that will let it tap into user interactions with Meta AI. 

Since people are spilling far more personal details to chatbots than they do in a normal scroll, that’s like handing the world’s nosiest ad machine an even bigger notebook.

Mosseri also argued that sometimes it’s just psychology at play. 

Maybe you saw an ad before you had the conversation and didn’t consciously register it, only to later think your phone read your mind. 

Humans, he suggests, are just bad at remembering what came first, the thought or the scroll.

So no, Instagram isn’t wiretapping your brunch plans. But with Meta’s new AI-driven ad strategy, it might not need to. 

If the microphone myth dies, it may be replaced by something even creepier: the feeling that the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself.

Here are two simpler CTA questions for this article:Do you believe Instagram isn’t using your microphone, or have your own experiences with eerily timed ads convinced you otherwise? Is Meta’s new plan to use AI chat interactions for ad targeting actually worse than microphone access, or just a natural evolution of personalized advertising? Tell us below in the comments, or carry the discussion to our Twitter or Facebook.