Let’s be scientific and run experiments. @boztank said unequivocally that FB does not do this, but it would not surprise me if there were Android apps that did listen surreptitiously and sold data. The claim from someone in that thread was that a group of people could put \
\ their phones on the table (presumably turned off), have a conversation, then have ads related to their conversation start appearing in their feeds. Key to making this more convincing would be making sure the topic of conversation was about something that the people had \
\ positively never searched for directly. There are a bunch of obscure, high value keywords that would be catnip to something like this. A third party could pick a keyword, verify that it produces ads after searching for it normally, then verbally bring it into the conversation \
\ with the phones on the table. After ten minutes, the phones are picked up, turned on, and checked for ads. I would bet money that iOS phones show no evidence of having “heard” the terms. I would also be surprised if it was actually common on Android. \
\ The null hypothesis is that people are Fooled By Randomness.
