Facebook still isn’t listening to you

It’s a common joke (or sometimes a fear) to “ be careful what you say, because Facebook (or Google) is listening to you “. While it may be often intended as a joke, there are many people that think it’s true and there are some decent reasons to believe that it might be. However, I don’t think it is and I have four reasons why.

1. Facebook would get caught

There are literally thousands of people out there that tear apart everything Facebook puts out, trying to catch them in the act of listening — and they’ve found nothing. These are brilliant people, and there has been no evidence of Facebook or Google secretly listening to our conversations. As a simple example, here is an ongoing series of posts at XDA where they dig deep into the code for various Android app updates to see what they can find. Other people go much deeper, many want to be able to find bad things against Facebook, and they always come up empty.

2. They’re still not great listeners

Every night before I head up to bed, I tell my Google Home to “turn off my home office lights”. The house is dead quiet, I stand right in front the speaker, speak carefully, and it still gets it wrong once a week or so. The listening skills of these devices is amazingly good, but far from perfect. If this speaker can’t…