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00:00Is Facebook listening into your conversations in order to sell targeted ads?
00:04Hi, I'm tech writer Matt Mohn-Hickson and in this video that's a question we'll look to answer.
00:10If you go on Meta's website, which is obviously Meta on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram,
00:15they say that they only use the microphone functions on your phone if you've agreed to it
00:21and for features that require it. So if you're making a voice call on Messenger, if you're
00:26doing a video call on WhatsApp and, you know, the microphone of your phone is needed for people to
00:32hear what you're saying, that's where they say they only use the microphone functions there.
00:37But you do have the option to turn it off. So if you go in your privacy settings of your phone,
00:41you can click, you know, allow access or not allow access if you don't want.
00:48But 404 Media had a report recently which sort of raised hackles a bit.
00:53They'd got their hands on some leaked documents from a American media conglomerate called the
00:58Cox Media Group who claim to have this active listening software which is supposedly powered
01:05by artificial intelligence, obviously the very in-vogue thing at the moment, but powered by AI
01:10and it's used to sort of listen into conversations and harvest data from customers for better
01:16advertising. In response to that, Google has removed them from the partnership part of their
01:22website. They've moved after being approached by 404 Media. Meta have strongly come back and said
01:30we do not listen into your conversations. So these companies already have so much data about you that
01:36they really don't need to listen into your conversations just to catch a few keywords.