No, Facebook is not listening to your conversations.

It’s happened again. Another friend of mine just posted this on Facebook.

My friend is a super-smart woman and well-meaning.

But she’s wrong.

Facebook’s app does not listen in to your conversations, then display ads to you from what you say.

It doesn’t happen.

This is simply confirmation bias at play.

Some facts:

1. The amount of bandwidth to transmit everything your phone hears for processing at Facebook would consume hundreds of times your monthly cellular data limit. And your phone isn’t powerful enough to do that processing.

2. Facebook has more than 1B users. Even if they were to only “listen in” on 10% of those, there is simply no server farm powerful enough — not even at the NSA — to process all those millions of conversations through voice recognition, then match them to an ad auction.

3. I run Facebook ad campaigns for a living. If there were a way to target people by what they say, I’d know about it. Hell, I’d be using it.

4. Facebook has said publicly and clearly that they do not do this. For them to outright lie about this would put them at very serious jeopardy with their shareholders, the securities commissions, governments around the world, not the mention their users. They wouldn’t risk this for the sake of dollars.

It’s an interesting coincidence, but nothing more.

Can we all stop spreading this nonsense now?