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Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, has posted a new “myth-busting” video to clarify that the app doesn’t use your phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on you and push targeted content.
The video comes at a time when many users, including Mosseri’s wife, suspect Instagram of listening to user conversations. To break the myth, Mosseri starts with some practical points and then moves on to technical details.
If the app was indeed using your phone’s microphone, he says, you’d see a green dot at the top of your screen and drain your battery faster.
He then provides several reasons why you see ads for something you talked about. The first is that you may have interacted with content related to it or searched for it online or on a website. “We actually do work with advertisers who share information with us about who was on their website to try to target those people with ads,” he says.
Second, the app’s own algorithm pushes ads for stuff it thinks you might be interested in. This mechanism is also partly based on what your friends are interested in or what similar people with similar interests are looking for, meaning you might see an ad for products even your friends searched for.
Finally, Mosseri says, not every ad appears after you start talking about it. “You might have actually seen that ad before you had the conversation and not realized it… We scroll by ads quickly, and sometimes you internalize some of that, and that actually affects what you talk about later,” he says.
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Towards the end of the video, the Instagram chief admits that most people still won’t believe him. And judging by the comments on the video, he may have been right.
“Not convinced but thank you for clarifying,” writes one user. “It’s 2025, we already know y’all are listening. At this point I don’t even Google stuff, I just whisper it near my phone and wait for Instagram to do its thing,” writes another.
Notably, Meta has offered clarification on the issue at least three times before, and the latest one comes on the same day it announced it will be using content from your Meta AI chats to show targeted ads.
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Jibin is a tech news writer based out of Ahmedabad, India. Previously, he served as the editor of iGeeksBlog and is a self-proclaimed tech enthusiast who loves breaking down complex information for a broader audience.
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