Is Facebook Listening Your Conversations? Let’s Learn The Truth

Every single one of us has experienced this. One moment we were talking about something like a dress, a bag or a gateway to France and the next moment, we see a Facebook ad about it. This makes lots of people wonder if Facebook is keeping tabs on them.

Is Facebook spying on us?

You will actually find lots of articles, podcasts, and posts speculating about social media apps that are using microphones on our smart devices for listening to our conversations and then serving up ads on the basis of what they hear. Such conspiracy theories have been around for years even though Facebook denied listening to the conversations of its users.

Facebook released a statement in June 2016 that said it does not use your phone’s microphone to display ads or change what you see on your Facebook news feed.  Even the VP of Facebook’s ad product denied using microphones to show targeted ads to the user.

Then what’s the explanation of the creepy ads that we see throughout the day? This makes lots of people strongly believe that this app is, in, fact listening to their conversations. Surprisingly, lots of people even conducted their own experiments to prove how Facebook is snooping on us. Tech experts, however, are still skeptical about these theories. In order to understand how things actually work, you need to understand how websites track the activities of users.

The theory behind targeted ads

Targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram are shown on the basis of your interactions with other users and that includes the photos or videos you like, the places you check in and the links you click on. Other than this, Facebook targeted ads are also based on the interests of your Facebook friends and the websites you visit. If you haven’t searched for a Kate Spade bag but one of your Facebook friends did, you might start seeing related ads. As much weird it is, it’s true.  Other than this, businesses use a small snippet called Facebook pixel on their sites that allows the advertisers to show ads on Facebook based on the websites visited by the user outside Facebook.

Do Facebook Spying Apps leak your likes and interests?

Some people have the misconception that Facebook Spying Apps are responsible for leaking their interests but they are being used for a totally different purpose. A good example of one of the popular Facebook spying apps is Xnspy. It’s actually a monitoring app that lets you keep tabs on someone’s Facebook Messenger chats. It must be installed on the smartphone of the person whom you want to keep tabs on and it keeps on uploading their chats on its online web account. A Facebook spying app like Xnspy has nothing to do with advertisers. This app is mostly used by parents to protect their kids from online predators, cyberbullies and to observe how they use social media to share what’s going on in their lives.

What can you do about those targeted ads?

Like many people out there, you must be quite uncomfortable with how advertisers are tracking your interests and activities on Facebook as well as outside Facebook. To put an end to this, you can change the ad settings on your Facebook. It’s pretty easy. Just go to account “Settings” and then “Your ad preferences” and you can adjust how you want ads to be shown on the basis of your profile information such as your job title, location, and even your relationship status. You can also opt out of the Facebook pixel function so that your activities outside Facebook are not tracked by advertisers. Experts say that another great way of keeping away from these ads is to download an ad blocker to avoid the target ads altogether.

If you are worried about the Facebook spying apps, then there are some ways to protect your device from them too. Since these apps are usually installed manually on your smartphone, make sure you keep your device locked all the time. Don’t share your PIN with anyone. Always keep your phone’s OS updated as this automatically removes all malware, bugs, and spying apps from your device. If you are still convinced that apps are listening to your conversations, then simply remove their access to the microphone of your phone by going into the app settings.