Facebook Says It's Not Secretly Recording You (fb.com)

In 2014 Facebook introduced a feature which can use your phone's microphone to identify songs you're listening to -- but "we don't record your conversations," they're reminding users. 

A mass communication professor at the University of South Florida tried discussing specific topics near her phone, then discovered Facebook appeared to be showing ads related to what she'd said. 

Though she wasn't convinced there was a link, the Independent newspaper reported that "The claim chimes with anecdotal reports online that the site appears to show ads for things that people have mentioned in passing."

An official statement Thursday reiterated that "Facebook does not use your phone's microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed." 

But another news site sees these concerns as a reminder of all the permissions users routinely grant to their apps. 

"Go into your phone's application settings and you'll see a whole list of what an app like Facebook has access to: your camera, your location, your contacts, and, yes, your microphone too. 

 How about this for a warning? 

By downloading Facebook you give the app 'permission to record audio at any time without your confirmation.' Tom's Guide security editor Paul Wagenseil says Facebook can...listen to your conversations...but it would be illegal to do so."
 
Meanwhile, the FBI "can neither confirm nor deny" that it's ever tapped an Amazon Echo device.

Working at Facebook Sounds Like Joining a Cult (gizmodo.com) 

 Vanity Fair has run some excerpts from an upcoming book by a former employee that gives insight on how things work at the social network.

The chapter, among other things, details Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's actions when Google launched its own social networking service Google Plus.

 The extract finds Zuckerberg's behaviour so intense that it calls it "bordered on the psychopathic."

It reads: [...] hit Facebook like a bomb. Google Plus was the great enemy's sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else.

 He declared "Lockdown," the first and only one during my time there.

 As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook's earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical.â [...] 

Rounding off another beaded string of platitudes, he changed gears and erupted with a burst of rhetoric referencing one of the ancient classics he had studied at Harvard and before.

 "You know, one of my favorite Roman orators ended every speech with the phrase Carthago delenda est. 'Carthage must be destroyed.' 

For some reason I think of that now."