Instagram is listening to you – Damián Le Nouaille – Medium
▻https://medium.com/@damln/instagram-is-listening-to-you-97e8f2c53023
Some weeks ago, I saw an ad (sponsored post) on Instagram that surprised me. It was about a product I never googled, shared, liked, or talked about on any social network even in direct messages. I had a bad intuition: the only time this product came up was in a random chat with a couple of friends in a cafe. And the only way for Instagram to know about this was to listen to my real life conversations with the microphone.
Last week, I did an experiment to confirm this and the result is just as scary as you can imagine.
I actually forgot about this discussion and went back home. The day after in the morning, I checked my Instagram and guess what, I saw a perfect micro projector ad on my feed. I mean, exactly the one I wanted:
Guys, what’s going on here. I’m not a kid and I know that most of the biggest companies today are doing crazy stuff with our data. But we are talking about nearly real time analysis of our private conversations without any warnings about this. At least, I haven’t seen any legal stuff mentioning that Instagram was allowed to use my microphone in the background to listen to me. If you know more about this (like this article), let me know.
For the moment, just turn off the microphone access in your settings and turn it on only when necessary.
