Facebook Isn't Listening Through Your Phone's Microphone. It Doesn't Have To

In the bright-eyed naiveté of my first few weeks as Facebook's first leader of the ads targeting effort, I'd eagerly confront each new conspiracy theory. "Is Facebook scanning my photos and using that for ad targeting?" I'd also field new targeting ideas from Facebook employees themselves, who would construct just-so stories around some niche piece of user behavior, and how that could move the needle on Facebook's already soaring ad revenue (e.g. 'show burger ads to people who checked into In-N-Out'). Inevitably, the conspiracy theories and new ideas would die on the rocks of the threefold criterion I eventually formulated to debunk or discard (almost) all of them. Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) was the first ads targeting product manager on the Facebook Ads team, and author of the memoir Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.