Marketing company uses ‘active listening’ software to spy on consumers via their phones

Your smartphone really is smart enough to spy on your conversations with family and friends and rely information about your buying preferences and use that to make decisions about advertising. Have you ever just been talking about a certain product and then seen an ad for it appear on your phone?

A marketing firm whose clients include Facebook and Google is quietly acknowledging that it does monitor the microphones on smartphones to make advertising choices, according to 404 Media.

Cox Media Group (CMG), which controls a plethora of television and radio news outlets, has admitted that it uses a technology called “Active Listening” software that utilizes artificial intelligence to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations,” the New York Post reported.

“Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the company wrote in the pitch deck.

CMG said that smartphone users “leave a data trail based on their conversations and online behavior” that the AI technology can collect and assess. Facebook, Google and Amazon are all reportedly clients of CMG. Google no longer lists CMB as being a member of its “Partners Program” after being queried about it by 404 Media.

“All advertisers must comply with all applicable laws and regulations as well as our Google Ads policies, and when we identify ads or advertisers that violate these policies, we will take appropriate action,” a Google spokesperson told The Post.

Meta, the corporate overseer of Facebook and Instagram, is also reviewing its relationship with CMG to determine whether it fails to meet the company’s terms of service. “Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post. “We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data.”

Amazon claims it has never used CMG to advance its advertising objectives and would not hesitate to sever ties with any company that does not adhere to its privacy rules. Last December, New Hampshire-based MindSift claimed that it collected the data from phone conversations through smartphone microphones to plan its advertising, according to 404 Media.

The report also confirmed the use of CMG’s “Active Listening” feature. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the Department of Justice had wanted to use TikTok to spy on Americans.