TL; DR
Full story
You know that creepy theory that our phones are listening to us and sending important parts of our conversations to Facebook?
Good news: that doesn’t actually happen.
Bad news: it’s much worse than that.
See, listening to and transcribing a near-constant stream of audio is actually a pretty inefficient way to maintain a database of 3 billion daily users…
What platforms like Facebook do is track your every digital move and compile it into a spreadsheet known as a “social graph.”
This means every post you like, every website you visit, a friend you talk to, a comment you leave, a photo you post, a video you watch, an inbox you scroll to…
It’s all captured and merged into your social graph.