Many are still convinced that Instagram listens to the microphone. The app of the app has wanted to set the subject

In a meeting between friends you talk about making a weekend getaway, rural houses and whether it is worth renting a car. Hours later, when Instagram opens, ads appear for travel agencies, car rental portals and route recommendations. The feeling that The mobile “hears us” It is installed easily. In this context, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, published a video to disassemble that myth and explain why we see ads that seem to guess our conversations. Meta has almost a decade denying sharply that their applications access the microphone without permission, but doubts never disappear at all. Now the discussion returns to the front line because The company has announced thatas of December, conversations with their artificial intelligence assistant will also be part of the customization of ads and recommendations (this change will not apply, at least for now, in the European Union). The denial and this novelty have communicated almost at the same time, which adds a striking nuance to the message. Mosseri says they don’t listen to us, while finishing another key novelty The closeness between both communications did not go unnoticed. Instagram head chosen a personal tone, even light, but at the same time he wanted cut the suspicion that the application listens to its users. He presented that statement as a starting point on which to build his explanation. His words were clear and it is worth reproducing them in full: “We do not listen to you. We do not use the microphone of the phone to spy on. If we did, it would be a serious violation of privacy. In addition, we would exhaust the battery of the device and noticed it, and you would even see a small light in the upper part of the screen that would tell you that the microphone is on.” For Mosseri, what seems to really be the effect of four quite common situations. One possibility is that before talking about a topic and lor we have sought without remembering it. Another is that someone in our environment has done it and the platform takes it as a indication. It can also happen that the announcement has appeared before and we did not pay attention, but that it later sneaks into the conversation. And the simplest explanation of all remains: it is a mere coincidence. “I want to reiterate that we do not listen to your microphone. I know that some of you are not going to believe me no matter how much I try to explain, but I wanted to make things clear. I am sure that the comments in this publication will be a bit intense. We see you soon. Paz.” It was not the first time that the company was trying to settle the suspicion. In 2016, Facebook said that did not use the phone’s microphone to guide ads or to change what appears in the Feed. Two years later, in an appearance before the United States Senate, Mark Zuckerberg was asked directly on the subject and rSponge With a “no” just as sharp. Years later, Meta support website itself included A document on the same line. Click to watch the video on Instagram Doubts about possible listening also led the academic community to test it. In 2017, a group of researchers from Northeastern University analyzed more than 17,000 Android applications, including those of Facebook, to check if they activated the microphone without the user knowing. After months of evidence, They found no evidence What happened. They did observe other data collection behaviors, but do not listen undercover. The authors themselves clarified, yes, that there were scenarios that were left out of their study. Beyond the studies, there is a technical aspect that should be remembered. In current mobiles, both in iOS and Android, any application that wants to use the microphone You need explicit user permission. In addition, when an actor appears active on the screen (a color point or a warning in the upper bar) that immediately points it. These notices, together with the extra battery consumption that would involve permanent listening, make it difficult to hide an undercover use of the microphone without the user noticed. The persistence of this myth is better understood if the context is observed. The directed advertising is so precise and so difficult to decipher for the average user that it is easier to attribute it to a microphone on than to an invisible data network. Our memory also influences. To this is added the history of mattress controversies in privacy. Images | Brett Jordan | Xataka with Gemini 2.5 | Screen capture In Xataka | I’ve been hooked to Sora 2 for two days: I’m generating absurd memes where I am the protagonist and I can’t stop

Instagram and Tiktok advertising has become short videos of people talking to a microphone. There is a reason: clippers

You enter Tiktok and Instagram and you start seeing ads that (no longer) surprisingly have a great similarity to each other despite promoting a very different product: a startup, a podcast, an application or an event. The key, as the Wall Street Journalis the way to viralize content that these platforms have, which has resulted in the emergence of a figure to earn money working online, Clippers. Mom, I want to be older clipper. The Clippers They are editors who take the long contents of platforms such as YouTube, Twitch or Spotify and make them short viralizable content in Tiktok, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts at the request (or not) of its creators. They also do the same with promotional videos of companies that want to increase the visibility of a specific product. Getting an attractive and effective video is not simple, but there is an ingredient that is almost always present, subtitles. There is Influencers farms and of clicksso there are also advertisements. You don’t have to have a big account. Nor generate videos to upload them to the corporate account of a client: companies pay in many cases because these editors upload videos to small accounts, but that also manage the contents thanks to FUncionation of algorithms. In addition, in the face of more advanced edition work, a clipper You can use online or free and powerful editing tools such as Capcut. There are even specialized platforms. WHOP is a platform for selling digital products and putting communities in contact. A kind of “app store for creators”. Before the rise of Tiktok, Shorts and Reels, the company identified that short clips were a bomb as viral advertising format, and created Whoop Clips, an ecosystem to contact brands and creators with Clippers. This activity is also promoted on websites such as Clipthis, YT Jobs or even In Reddit. There are also simple ads published as Tiktok videos. The explosion of these videos leads entrepreneurs as Pieter Levels (@levelsio) to offer video tools made with AI which generate subtitles using the Capcut subtitles API. In his day, Levels already said that All marketing around its apps and services would move to Tiktok After getting impressive results. Examples of 1x robot clips, Cluelly and the Smartphones nothing manufacturer The business model. According to the campaign, in whop between $ 0.50 and 5 dollars. He Wall Street Journal Speech reduces the maximum figure to about 2 dollars, dating examples such as Kanoah Cunningham, a former financial sector worker who now leads an eight team Clipperswith what generates monthly between $ 20,000 and $ 30,000 per month. Another case on the same line is that of Nathan Resnick, which pays $ 15,000 per month to about 50 clippers. Unlike what happens on platforms such as Fiver or Upwork, where a client pays an editor A fixed price for a final jobin whop there can be hundreds of Clippers making videos of the same ad and then upload it to small accounts. Only those who manage to obtain a considerable number of visits manage to make money. For others it will be lost time, so there is a strong incentive to optimize creations. The key to having a successful clip, according to Cunningham, is “building a story.” The numbers that explain the phenomenon. The brands, instead of paying an influencer for a video, manage to generate hundreds of clips and millions of low cost views. Roy Lee, founder of the Startup Cluely, states that “you are stupid if you are making a podcast of an hour and only public it in a channel.” His reasons to say it: 800,000 visits a day on Instagram and Tiktok. Max Peterson, who directs a clips market in Discord, directed a Tiktok campaign for the series’Adults‘which achieved 12 million visits in total. Peterson also says that a budget of $ 40,000, 1x technologies, the company after a Advanced humanoid robothe achieved 500 million total visits on the product on Tiktok. Yes, but. That the brands themselves want to see their video in hundreds of channels does not mean that Tiktok or Instagram will not mark it as stolen or copied content of others. So Clippers They have to work well how they cut their “creations” so that they do not eliminate their videos. Another problem of the practice of mass virality is that the veracity of the clips suffers at the will of the editor. According to Cunningham, it is often lie in the subtitles or a different meaning is given to the video looking for more visits. Image | EACH and Alpha film co In Xataka | A disturbing reality makes its way on social networks: we no longer use them to connect with friends

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