VICE writer Sam Nichols recently conducted an experiment showing this to be true. After casually noticing that some of the things he'd talked about with friends over his smartphone were suddenly showing up as advertising in his Facebook and Instagram apps, he decided to calculatedly speak certain phrases over and over again to see if those things showed up, too. And the scary thing is that they did.
Twice a day for five days, Nichols made sure to talk about things like going back to university and needing to purchase affordable shirts for work. And sure enough, he began to notice advertising changes in his social media accounts almost immediately, suggesting that the Silicon Valley mafia is actively invading people's privacy and spying on what they say and do in order to sell more advertising space.
"From time to time, snippets of audio do go back to [other apps like Facebook's] servers, but there's no official understanding what the triggers for that are," says Dr. Peter Hannay, a former lecturer and researcher at Edith Cowan University Western Australia, and senior security consultant for cybersecurity firm Asterisk.
"Whether it's timing or location-based or usage of certain functions, [apps] are certainly pulling those microphone permissions and using those periodically. All the internals of the applications send this data in encrypted form, so it's very difficult to define the exact trigger."
Facebook in particular vehemently denies that it spies on its users, but this can't be true based on Nichols' experiments. As many people would probably conclude, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of his tribe are blatantly lying whenever they deny using technology to listen in on the conversations and web-browsing habits of social media users, especially since we all know that Facebook possesses such technology.
"Seeing Google are open about it, I would personally assume the other companies are doing the same," adds Dr. Hannay. "Really, there's no reason they wouldn't be. It makes good sense from a marketing standpoint, and their end-use agreements and the law both allow it, so I would assume they're doing it, but there's no way to be sure."
If Facebook and Instagram are listening, then so is the NSA and maybe even the CIA
Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that the data collected from social media spying is likely, at least in some cases, ending up in the hands of government agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) and even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Truth be told, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram likely exist for the very purpose of feeding intelligence to these bloated federal agencies, all under the guise of keeping people connected. Evidence of this turned up back in 2012 when investigative journalists went down the rabbit trail of how Facebook began, uncovering that the social media site has direct financial ties to the CIA.
"... our phones are listening to us and anything we say around our phones could potentially be used against us," warns Nichols, adding the caveat that "unless you're a journalist, a lawyer, or have some kind of role with sensitive information, the access of your data is only really going to advertisers." That's quite a change from what the left-wing media used to report; that anyone who believed electronic devices are spying on our conversations was a tin foil hat-wearing nut job. Now, the spying is admitted and the media says it's fine.
For more news on how multinational corporations and the federal government are invading the personal privacy of American citizens, visit PrivacyWatchNews.com.
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