You Can Check If Facebook Is Spying On You With This Experiment

Have you ever been somewhat alarmed when your social media apps happen to advertise something you were just talking about a day earlier? Now, there’s now a way to check if they’re spying on you.

This ‘genius’ test may just answer that question.

Hendriksen begins his video by saying ‘Facebook doesn’t listen to you’. Well, that’s our question answered.

However, as the content creator continues, he explains that it’s ‘not because they can’t [listen] it’s because they don’t have to’. The reality, he claims, is ‘actually much worse than that’.

Hendriksen explains:

If you use the web, any website, there’s likely a tracker on your browser that was left there by an application like Facebook at some point when you visited the Facebook page, and that tracker sends a signal back to Facebook saying ‘hey, this person looked at this thing’.

Here’s the weird part, Hendriksen claims that supposedly ‘happens even if you don’t have a Facebook account’.

He continued, ‘you’ll still get tracked if you actively use the internet, unless you delete your cookies constantly’.

There’s more though, Hendriksen alleges that ‘if you hang out with someone else’, whether that’s your partner, close friends or children, the process of gathering information becomes more ‘invasive’.

He says that:

Over time the system figures out that these phones, or these devices, are often in near contact with each other, so that means that these people are likely talking to each other.

We’ve all had that moment where we’ve spoken to a friend about something and it’s magically popped up in our suggested google search they next day.

Hendriksen explains that this because:

Your friend, who you’re hanging out with all the time, made the same search, and Facebook figured out that those two people hang out a lot together and, therefore, it’s likely that they’re gonna make the same searches.

This, he goes on to add, is made possible by companies like Facebook and Google ‘sharing their data’.

According to Hendriksen, it’s not just Facebook. He says if ‘you’re using the same device all the time, and hanging out with the same people all the time, these companies will know pretty much everything about you’.

However, Facebook has strongly denied the allegation that they listen in on conversations.

A spokesperson for the social media site said:

We show ads based on people’s interests and other profile information — not what you’re talking out loud about.

But, if you want to test this for yourself, you can call one of your friends, discuss something you need and get them to search it on their phone. Then, you can see if it comes up in your own suggested searches a few days later.

Hendriksen says that your friend would need to search the thing you’re looking for though, as just speaking about it won’t do the trick.

‘Your conversations are ignored, but the moment you do some kind of text input, everything shows up immediately,’ he added.