so is wiretapping, but in our household we have a running joke that if we're too lazy to google something, or say "ok google", we can just say "ok facebook bed frame bed frame bed frame" in the direction of our phones, and fb/instagram will start showing us ads for bed frames in a few hours. It works a surprisingly large amount of the time.

I can't speak for other platforms, but if you've ever developed apps for iPhone, you'd know this is pretty much impossible for FB to do.

Doing this specific thing is quite easy, using public APIs, just by correlating data between signed in users.

I should be more clear: I'm referring to secretly recording audio.

This is not actually happening, and I'm sad to see how long this misinformation persists on HackerNews... Not only not technically feasible, it'd also get out in the numerous lawsuits that Facebook is involved in, which get access to internal information like this.

It happened to me and other people I know too. How can people in the comments deny that when a lot of people have empirical evidence?

If you give the permission to Messenger to use the microphone, that is required to make voice calls, then I believe it's possible for it to use it anytime.

There is not a lot of empirical evidence for this, and even less evidence of any other kind.

What -does- have a lot of that, is the statement that humans are particularly bad at classifying random events.

You’re imagining it. It’s crazy that this kind of disinformation is still going around.

Wiretapping is only illegal if you don't give permission for it. By having a device that's always recording audio, you're implicitly giving permission for what you describe.