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Well first and foremost, as an app on iOS/Android, you can't just access the mic whenever you feel like it. There's also an available audit trail for when it i

Well first and foremost, as an app on iOS/Android, you can't just access the mic whenever you feel like it. There's also an available audit trail for when it is accessed. So it's trivial to know whether the Facebook app uses the mic without being asked to do so by the user. Unless you think they are 'being sneaky' by developing zero day exploits to break permissions boundaries and prevent logging on both Android and iOS. What's more likely is that: (a) we're all a lot more predictable than we'd like to admit, and (b) you underestimate the multitude of data sources available to Facebook and piped over to its ecosystem. Just because an ad is on Facebook, doesn't mean Facebook is the one providing all the targeting data.

rattray 6y ago
> Unless you think they are 'being sneaky' by developing zero day exploits to break permissions boundaries and prevent logging on both Android and iOS. Pretty much, yes. Perhaps only one of the two operating systems, and perhaps not all versions. I'm not confident they've done that, but it'd be hard to prove they haven't, and frankly it seems like the kind of thing FB might do (I'm sure not everybody would agree). It's certainly possible that FB is just wildly superior at understanding/predicting people than humans are. Their targeting is, after all, really good.