Instagram head Adam Mosseri took to his account this week to debunk one of the internet’s longest-running conspiracy theories: that Meta secretly uses your phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on private conversations for ad targeting.
“We’re not listening,” Mosseri insists, noting that if your mic were active, you’d see a notification on your phone and your battery life would tank.
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The claim isn’t new. Facebook (as it was then) published a blog post in 2016 denying it. Mark Zuckerberg repeated it under oath before Congress. And now, with new waves of paranoia circulating, Mosseri is restating it once again, even joking that his own wife still asks him about it.
But here’s the twist: Mosseri’s reassurance comes just as Meta announces an even more intimate form of data collection. Starting December 16, the company’s updated privacy policy will allow it to use the information from users’ interactions with its AI products, chats with Meta AI, prompts, and conversations, as new signals for ad targeting.
Mosseri explains that Meta doesn’t need to “listen” to know what you want. Advertisers already share data about who has visited their websites. The platform layers on its own behavioral signals, then adds the “people like you” effect, showing you ads based on what similar users have clicked on.
That system has powered Meta’s ad business for years, creating the eerie accuracy that often fuels the mic-myth. As Mosseri points out, sometimes it’s just psychology: you might have seen an ad before a conversation, not noticed, and then brought it up later.
What changes now is that Meta is feeding an entirely new data stream into its ad engine: conversations with AI. With over a billion people reportedly chatting with Meta AI every month, the company suddenly has access to a much more personal layer of data: your interests, ideas, and intentions, expressed in your own words.
So while Mosseri can confidently deny microphone snooping, Meta may not need to listen in the traditional sense. With AI chats fueling the ad machine, the “creepy” factor may only increase.