Instagram eavesdrops on every user for advertising purposes - media

The Instagram social network eavesdrops (Active Listening option) on each user for advertising purposes.

This fact was admitted by one of the main partners of the platform for the provision of advertising services, Cox Media Group (CMG), which has been working with Google and Meta for many years, 404 Media reports.

According to CMG's presentation as part of the development of an option for contextual advertising that literally reads users' minds:

• the company offers clients the service of "active listening";
• the option allows AI to eavesdrop on your conversations near the smartphone, as well as analyze the user's actions on the network;
• Active Listening captures any sounds from the microphone of any smartphone;
• Active Listening algorithms make it possible to deliver the most accurate advertising to clients.

For example, after the phrase "need a new t-shirt" that the user speaks next to the phone, he begins to see an influx of targeted advertising for t-shirts.

CMG's main clients are Google, Amazon and Meta. Notably, Google and Meta removed any mention of CMG from their resources after the Active Listening usage data was released. Amazon told the media that they know about this service, but have never used it. Facebook explained that they urgently "started checking" this information from the mass media.

As previously reported, the Meta Corporation, which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, will begin to identify and separately label images generated by artificial intelligence services of other companies, including the most common, namely OpenAI and Google.