You know that joke about how our Facebook advertisements seem to know what we were looking for after having that conversation? Well, turns out that it's quite true. As confirmed in leaked documents from one of Facebook's alleged marketing partners.
According to sources, the leaked documents revealed some juicy revelations from Cox Media Group (CMG) which is a big TV and radio company in the US. Apparently, the company proposed a pitch deck to Facebook of an "Active Listening" software that uses AI to "capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversation". It even shows how this software can capture voice data in a phone and then convert it into behavioural data, refining the targeted advertisements.
CMG's leaked documents also allegedly confirmed that besides Facebook, both Google and Amazon (unsurprisingly) are clients of Active Listening. Interestingly, CMG was removed by Google from its Partner Program list right after the news source published it a few hours ago. This also made Meta review its partnership with CMG to see if it has violated any terms of service.
On top of that, CMG even had a blog post last year regarding the ethics of Active Listening. The source says the blog has already been deleted but what goes online, stays online. This is one of the excerpts about it:
"We know what you're thinking. Is this even legal? It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page term of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included,"
We can't really do much about Active Listening but what we can do is decide for ourselves if we really need a certain product. We can always hide that annoying advertisement after all.
COMMENTS