A lot of online users suspect that Facebook listens to their phone calls. This led to many doing their personal ‘investigation about it’.

A YouTube user, Neville, and his wife started noticing ads popping up that were eerily similar to the things they’d been talking about the day before.

So they decided they would do a test. They didn’t own a cat, they hadn’t had one in 20 years and never talked about them.

They set up a phone call, where they both repeated the words “cat” and “cat food” over and over again during a 10-minute phone call.

A few days later, both his and her Facebook feed were filled with cat food commercials (see above).

Ever noticed something similar in your case? Probably yes.

But why does it happen? The truth is that social media apps can and do listen to your phone calls. They do it because they know that the more targeted they can make their ads, the more they can charge companies for those ads.

So to make more highly targeted ads, they want to get right inside of your head and know everything about you.

Solution? If you don’t want Facebook (or any app) to listen to your calls, you need to go into your settings on your phone, find the app, click on permissions, and disable access to the microphone.

Social media companies will get as much information as possible about you with little regard for what is right or wrong. Just as long as it is legal (enough), they’ll do it!