Tom Bubul .info
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Is instagram listening to my phone?
I got into this convo irl enough in the last ~18 months that I thought I should put a page up about it. If anyone can link me something reasonably peer-reviewed or data-driven or whatever abt any aspect of how this works in reality I'd love to read & link it.
1. It's technically unlikely that Instagram is literally listening to my phone.
If Instagram was listening to my phone, my phone would need to be using battery power and streaming data to a server. When phones do these things, it's observable. To me this intuitively means that if Instagram was listening, there would be no question about it, because it would be showable.
2. On-the-nose ads are real, but my nose is common
But let's say Instagram could collect and parse generic audio from its 100+ million American users, and dedicate infrastructure and staff to storing and processing that raw feed into something that could be used to more optimally serve ads, all at a net profit, and without detection. Would it even be necessary?
Do I get "posture correction device" ads because Instagram heard me discuss my computer-job posture when it snooped my irl conversations? I'm more likely to believe it can see that I have bad posture from the photos I appear in, or can connect my logged-in account to a "posture exercises" search.
But still it's probably way more basic: I'm an age 36 New York City-located man with an "artist"-style account, so the idea that I have ergonomic problems that I'm uncomfortably aware enough of to want to solve isn't a bad guess at the highly-general level. That it resonates with me because I searched "posture exercises" recently on youtube is a happy coincidence for whatever advertiser, catching a wave on the frequency illusion. I don't consider how any of the many other non-coincident ads I scroll past might be aggressively but somewhat inaccurately targeting me too, or what their sinister relationship to my recent irl speach might be.
Another consideration: I can't be sure I didn't see an ad for some product, unconsciously internalize it, act on it in an unrelated way, and only register it in my awareness as "on the nose" after seeing it again later. That ads or content could seek to subtly manufacture "organic" or "authentic"-seeming interest in future ads feels like a strategy to be more openly alert to.
3. Instagram's targeting tools deserve more basic credit
Maybe I still don't believe that my extremely common experience of Instagram ads sometimes being uncannily-accurately-targeted is dismissible as a matter of my being gas-lit, basic, or tricked by coincidence. What if the missing piece here is that the platform's ridiculously powerful and accurate targeting is just working, and that what's due is a clear-eyed relationship to that, and not some crazier explanation? This is just Clarke's third law, that "any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Consider also this selection from this Radden-Keefe piece in The New Yorker about the guy who produced "The Apprentice":
Fran Lebowitz once remarked that [the current president] is "a poor person's idea of a rich person." [The season one contestant & Goldman Sachs banker Kwame Jackson] was struck, when the show aired, by the extent to which Americans fell for the ruse. "Main Street America saw all those glittery things, the helicopter and the gold-plated sinks, and saw the most successful person in the universe," he recalled. "The people I knew in the world of high finance understood that it was all a joke."
The idea that most people can't imagine what an actual contemporary expression of the extreme excesses of global wealth looks like - and instead think it's just gold sinks or whatever - feels related here.
I can readily imagine the platform digesting and parsing the data its 1B+ users already provide to it via normal internet and platform activity, and producing something that resembles the product of eavesdropping, without literally requiring it. "Instagram's listening to my phone" becomes a gold-sinks-style layman's failure to recognize the built systems at work - reducing the complexity and sophistication of contemporary adtech to massive, passive audio surveillance
The obvious critical pivot here is that my "surveillance" is derived entirely from my use, not secretly imposed on me by a corporation that needs something from me beyond what I've consented to provide. This feels useful to me to help orient a non-conspiracy-driven sense of the real individual cost of my participation in "free" platforms that trade on data.
Links
Here's Jeff's Instagram might be listening to your phone (dub)
Top. First posted 1/24/2019, edited 12/21/2019. This page is free of tracking codes.