Ever had a conversation with your friend about something, and then Instagram, almost immediately, feeds you ads for that very thing?
You may have thought to yourself: “Is Instagram listening to my conversations?”
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, is aware of how you feel. Even his wife brought up the subject to him a few times.
The Instagram boss posted a “myth-busting” video on Wednesday to set the record straight: “I swear, we do not listen to your microphone.”
“First of all, if we did, it would be a gross violation of privacy. You would drain your phone’s battery, and you would notice. And you would actually see a little light at the top of the screen letting you know that the mic was on,” he said.
Mosseri explained that Instagram has other mechanisms in place to serve targeted ads.
For one, a user may have “tapped” on something related or may have searched for a particular product online before the conversation began.
“We actually do work with advertisers who share information with us about who was on their website to try to target those people with ads,” he said.
The Instagram app also considers what users’ friends are interested in and what similar people with similar interests are looking at.
“So it could be that you were talking to someone about a product and they, before, had actually looked for or searched for that product,” Mosseri said. “Or that in general, people with similar interests were doing the exact same thing.”
Mosseri said another explanation could be that the user may have unknowingly already seen the ad before a conversation took place, influencing what the user talks about later.
“We scroll quickly, we scroll by ads quickly, and sometimes you internalize some of that, and that actually affects what you talk about later,” he said.
Instagram has explained on its website that ads are served based on a mix of a user’s activity on and off Meta’s platforms. This could include tracking a user’s activity online through third-party cookies, even if they didn’t log in with their Facebook account on a particular website.
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A spokesperson for Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
Meta will start to look at AI convos
Meta may not listen to your real-life conversations with others to serve ads. But your chats with the company’s AI tools are a different story.
On the same day Mosseri published his video, Meta said that it will start personalizing ads based on users’ interactions with chatbots.
“We will soon use your interactions with AI at Meta to personalize the content and ads you see, including things like posts and reels,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Meta said that people will be notified about this update starting next week via notifications and emails. The update will go into effect on December 16, 2025.
Business Insider previously reported how Meta improves its AI chatbots by using human contract workers who will read the conversations between humans and the chatbots.
A Meta spokesperson said at the time that the company has “strict policies” about how workers handle sensitive information.
Mosseri, the Instagram head, provided one more explanation for why an Instagram user might see an ad for something they just talked about: Pure coincidence.
“Random chance. Coincidence. It happens,” he said.
Mosseri said that he knows people still won’t believe him even after posting the video. This is not the first time he’s had to address the spying rumors, after all.
