Here’s how to stop Facebook from secretly listening your conversation

Facebook is  using people’s smartphones to listen to what they say. But don’t worry, here is an easy solution to stop it

It seems like Facebook have decided to take their advertisement service to the next level. We are already familiar with news that says that Facebook now tracks you even if you don’t have an account or even if you have logged out of your account. There’s nowhere to hide across the web, especially from the marketing and advertising companies.

Sounds scary right ? Well there is more to it. Facebook now uses people’s phone mic to listen to conversation. Yes you heard it right.

Professor Kelli Burns has accused the social networking giant of listening to mobile phone audio of users through one of its features that are only available in the US. Prof. Burns teaches Mass Communications at the University of South Florida and he has managed to open a Pandora’s Box by suggesting that Facebook app might have been prying over unsuspecting users.

Professor Burns has said that the tool appears to be using the audio it gathers not simply to help out users, but might be doing so to listen in to discussions and serve them with relevant advertising. She says that to test the feature, she discussed certain topics around the phone and then found that the site appeared to show relevant ads.

Prof. Burns also proved this by enabling microphone feature on her mobile phone and spoke that she would like to go on a safari: “I’m really interested in going on an African safari. I think it’d be wonderful to ride in one of those jeeps.

Within 60 seconds there appeared a post on her Facebook feed about a safari story, which was posted around three hours before.

But according to the social network’s spokesperson: “Facebook does not use microphone audio to inform advertising or News Feed stories in any way. Businesses are able to serve relevant ads based on people’s interests and other demographic information, but not through the audio collection.”

This feature was introduced in 2014, around two years back and it is being purported by Facebook that it never “always” listens to or stores “raw audio” at all, but it does listens.

Here is how you can stop facebook from listening via your phone’s mic

You can easily turn off the microphone on your mobile phone and if you do so, Facebook won’t be able to turn it on even if it wanted to.

If you use iPhone, turn off microphone by following this pattern:

Settings> Privacy> Microphone.

If you are an Android users , you need to do this:

Settings> Privacy> Facebook> Permissions.