Zuckerberg confirms: Facebook does not spy on you through your microphone

It had been speculated that Facebook was using the microphone of smartphones to capture data and use it to push ads towards users. While np evidence has ever been proposed to prove this, some have just felt that Facebook did this, and so the urban legend has carried itself across the internet and ending up as a question asked at a Senate hearing.

The firm confirmed at the Senate hearing yesterday that it does not do so, and only uses audio in the Facebook app for a set of limited, delineated scenarios.

“Senator, let me get clear on this, you’re talking about this conspiracy theory that gets passed around that we listen to what’s going on on your microphone and use that for ads. ” Facebook’s CEO told the US Senate, “To be clear, we do allow people to take videos on their devices and share those, and videos have audio, so we do while you’re taking a video, record that and use that to make the service is better by making sure your videos have audio, but I think that is pretty clear. But I just wanted to make sure I was exhaustive there.”

So there you have it, the firm unequivocally does not use your microphone for nefarious means. And if it did, it’d be so trivial to prove this that a denial would be pointless.

Via The Verge.