Is Instagram Eavesdropping Your Phone’s Mic? CEO Speaks Out

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri took to his platform to "myth bust" claims that the Meta-owned app is listening to user's microphones for the purpose of pushing targeted advertisements and related content. It has been a prominent theory across several social networking apps for many years that this is happening, but hard evidence actually proving it is scarce. Lots of user testimonials and circumstantial evidence does seem to provide validity to these claims, but Adam Mosseri emphatically denies them to the Instagram userbase and (apparently) even to his own wife.

So, case closed, right? In some ways, yes. Hard evidence to prove the claim simply does not exist. But that doesn't mean that Instagram and Big Tech in general don't deserve scrutiny for the way they approach data mining for user-targeted advertising. We've already seen some controversy with Microsoft harvesting LinkedIn data for advertising and AI training. Big Tech CEOs have been overt about the measures they're willing to take to harvest data for AI, copyright and user consent be damned, and targeted advertising has been how the money is made for much longer than that.


As Adam Mosseri points out in his own video, there are other explanations for these uncannily-timed targeted ads or content to be appearing. He narrows down having engaged with similar content, having friends who have engaged with similar content, and sometimes even that you saw it earlier, forgot about it, and brought it up later. He also mentions random chance as a factor. But all of these rationales really boil down to the following: "You already give us (Internet advertisers) enough data about your activities and preferences. We don't need to spy on you."

Even taking Mosseri at face value, there's something a little bit off-putting about publicly-disclosed advertising measures being this uncannily good. But at least advertising is still trying to get your money the old-fashioned way—outright malware in the form of malicious browser extensions or apps won't even give you a choice in the matter.