“We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal?”
Actively Creepy
In a pitch deck to prospective customers, one of Facebook’s alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users’ smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.
As 404 Media reports based on documents leaked to its reporters, the TV and radio news giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its so-called “Active Listening” software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.”
“Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the deck continues.
In the same slideshow, CMG counted Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients of its “Active Listening” service. After 404 reached out to Google about its partnership, the tech giant removed the media group from the site for its “Partners Program,” which prompted Meta, the owner of Facebook, to admit that it is reviewing CMG to see if it violates any of its terms of service.
An Amazon spokesperson, meanwhile, told 404 that its Ads arm “has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so. The spox added, confusingly, that if one of its marketing partners violates its rules, the company will take action.
Ill-Fated Admissions
This latest leak marks the third time in a year that 404 has reported on CMG’s shady voice targeting service. Last December, the independent news site not only put a marketing company on blast for boasting about such creepy tech on its podcast, but also revealed the existence of CMG’s Active Listening feature.
Together with this latest update to the CMG saga, these stories bolster longstanding suspicions about advertisers using our phones to listen to us.
“We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal?” a since-deleted Cox blog post from November 2023 noted. “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.”
Beyond taking a big game, CMG did not cop to how it acquires its alleged voice data, instead saying only that it can identify users who are “ready-to-buy” and create targeted ad lists based on their interests. For this service, the media group that specializes in hyperlocal news charges $100 per day to target folks in a 10-mile radius, and $200 per day to target those in a 20-mile radius.
In its own reporting on the leak, Gizmodo found that CMG had not yet responded to its email asking for more information about “Active Listening,” and Futurism has also not yet heard back from our own queries.
Given that the company boasted about it on its public — and still archived — website before anyone began paying attention, however, it seems like it would be pretty hard at this juncture to deny that it was charging for its eavesdropping.
More on privacy: Hackers May Have Leaked Every American Social Security Information
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