Instagram says “We’re not spying on you!”
Have you ever been scrolling through IG or Facebook and an advertisement pops up for something you’re interested in, but you KNOW you’ve never Googled it, visited its website, or clicked on another ad for it?
Gayle King from “CBS This Morning” sat down with Instagram boss Adam Mosseri to figure out how it happens.
He insisted that the app is NOT spying on you, and basically called the entire thing a coincidence.
Mosseri said, quote, “There’s two ways that can happen: One is dumb luck, which can happen. The second is you might be talking about something because it’s top of mind, because you’ve been interacting with that type of content more recently.
“Maybe you’re really into food and restaurants . You saw a restaurant on Facebook or Instagram , you liked the thing, it’s top of mind . . . maybe that’s subconscious. Then it bubbles up later. I think this kind of happens often.
“But, we don’t look at your messages. We don’t listen on your microphone. Doing so would be super problematic for a LOT of different reasons. But I recognize that you’re not going to really believe me.” Uh…….
Instagram is owned by Facebook, and clearly Facebook has many data partners. They’re not shy about it . . . a lot of their ads are stuff that you recently searched for on Amazon or other sites.
However, there are other times it seems like you see an ad before searching for it.
Maybe they’re not outright listening in on your phone’s microphone, or combing through your messages, but there’s a HUGE amount of space between that and it being “dumb luck” or something you’d forgotten looking into online.
Whatever method they use, clearly they’re not going to admit to it; probably because they’re finding a loophole to social media privacy laws.
Check out a preview of the interview below:
