Broken Trust Crisis

Right now, almost half of the people on the planet are actively using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger; there are 2.6 billion using Facebook alone. Very simply put, Facebook has a LOT of users. There you were, talking to your friend about a potential vacation trip to Paris this winter. Hours later, when you were idly scrolling through Facebook, you noticed numerous ads come up on discounted flight trips to Paris. I am pretty sure we all have experienced a situation like this. So, the real question is: ‘Is Facebook listening to users, and then serving ads based on this spying?’ According to numerous experiments, carried by Wandera, a mobile cyber-security company, Facebook doesn’t listen to our

physical conversations and dialogues. Some people even suggest that it’s virtually impossible for Facebook to record and listen to people’s conversations or dialogues. This is often because the typical voice-over-internet call takes approximately 24 kbps, which amounts to about 3 kB per second.

Assuming that an individual possesses a phone, which is switched on half the day, that's about 130 MBs per day, per user. There are around 150 million daily active users within the US, so that's about 20 petabytes per day, just within the US. That would mean the daily consumption rate in this case would be 600 terabytes, while Facebook simply has a maximum data storage space of 300 petabytes. Therefore, if Facebook recorded users’ conversations, its storage space would get over within 500 days. Thus, proving in theory that it’s virtually impossible to record users’ conversations. However, Facebook admits that they have been tracking users and collecting information based on them through, communications, photographs, videos, accounts, hashtags, and other groups that users are

connected to. So, they are tracking us, but they aren’t listening to our conversations.

And it is this massive trove of trackable data which is how companies like Facebook are able to serve us targeted ads that occasionally seem frighteningly accurate.

At the end of the day, most users have a reason to be paranoid because Facebook has been responsible for numerous privacy scandals such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the 2016 presidential election. Adding on, Facebook has also been held responsible for selling user data, losing user data, or mishandling user data. The company has major trust issues. This is the reason why so manypeople believe that Facebook is spying on them.

In conclusion, people voluntarily offer a huge array of user data whenever they use applications such as Facebook. It may be from how they are feeling, to where they are, to what they buy and who they know. Facebook is eerily good at serving ads because they need an absurdly large trove of data about users and their habits supported by their online activity. Perhaps more importantly, Facebook has hooks everywhere online, so your activity outside of social media often turns into usable data also. The social media giant doesn't have to listen in on your conversations to serve you ads — it already has all the data it needs.