Simon Willison’s Weblog

Last September I posted a series of long ranty comments on Lobste.rs about the latest instance of the immortal conspiracy theory (here it goes again) about apps spying on you through your microphone to serve you targeted ads.

On the basis that it's always a great idea to backfill content on your blog, I just extracted my best comments from that thread and turned them into this full post here, back-dated to September 2nd which is when I wrote the comments.

My rant was in response to the story In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention. Here's how it starts:

Which is more likely?

1. All of the conspiracy theories are real! The industry managed to keep the evidence from us for decades, but finally a marketing agency of a local newspaper chain has blown the lid off the whole thing, in a bunch of blog posts and PDFs and on a podcast.
2. Everyone believed that their phone was listening to them even when it wasn’t. The marketing agency of a local newspaper chain were the first group to be caught taking advantage of that widespread paranoia and use it to try and dupe people into spending money with them, despite the tech not actually working like that.

My money continues to be on number 2.

You can read the rest here. Or skip straight to why I think this matters so much:

Privacy is important. People who are sufficiently engaged need to be able to understand exactly what’s going on, so they can e.g. campaign for legislators to reign in the most egregious abuses.

I think it’s harmful letting people continue to believe things about privacy that are not true, when we should instead be helping them understand the things that are true.