We all know this phenomenon: You are talking to a friend about a product, head home, scroll on Instagram and the exact brand is shown to you in an ad in-between your favorite influencers’ stories. Suddenly, you have the creeping revelation that your phone listened to you.
Well, Meta denied over and over again that they are using your microphone to spy on you. And to be blunt:
It does not matter whether they are telling us the truth, because they do not even have to listen.
It is a lot of work to store everything you say and analyze it to get useful information out of it — information that advertisers could target efficiently. Not that companies like Alphabet or Meta do not have the capacity to do so, but it is not information they are necessarily desperate for.
Why not? Because you already gave it to them.
This does not mean, that you told them what product you talked about with your friend, but rather that you gave them the right to deduce your interests. One simple explanation could be the following: After you head home from your friend's place, they search for the product you just talked about. Since you both were logged into the same WiFi network while spending time together, there is a clear connection between you two — enough to deduce that you might also be interested in this product your friend is now feeding the search engine with. As a result, you see an ad for it and the eerie feeling grows on you: “Did they hear us?” All this happens because you gave Instagram the right to track your location when you posted that picture from your last vacation in the Maldives. But don’t worry, platforms like Instagram are also able to approximate your location if you do not enable GPS; by virtue of your IP address.
So even if you think there is no way a company could have enough information on you to show these uncannily targeted ads — they most likely do.
Why is this problematic?
Platforms using your location or IP address is not uncommon, but I think it sheds light on an interesting fact beyond that: The consent for processing this type of data is so sneakily obtained that users rather assume that their phone is listening in. This shows how little awareness there is for the power that results from the voluntarily shared data.
As a result, worse than just using information like this for advertising is the way in which it is obtained: Namely by exploiting the lack of knowledge by consumers. This constitutes a power asymmetry between users and platforms, where the platforms ask for payment in data of users who are completely in the dark about the value of what they are selling.
It is analogous to offering a child the choice between candy and a 100-dollar bill — the kid might choose to give up the money, but that does not mean they were informed about what choice they made.
To me, it does not feel like a relief that platforms are most likely not listening. Instead, it reveals how much power they have based on the consent they sneakily obtained from you and the information they already have. Their ability to target ads so perfectly — without even listening — might be even more uncanny.
