I like this tour by Tom of why the now-common folk notion that "Instagram is listening to your phone" is unlikely. But I especially like its quality as a time capsule that we can point back to with disgust or delight in 5 years.
To that end, I'm hypothesizing a counter-notion, sort of related to this passage:
I can imagine the platform digesting and parsing the data its 1B+ users already provide to it via normal internet and platform activity, and producing something that resembles the product of eavesdropping, without requiring it. "Instagram's listening to my phone" becomes a gold-sinks-style layman's failure to apprehend and appreciate the more sophisticated built systems at work.
What if it's true as Tom says that Instagram is complex enough that "phone listening" capabilities are sort of besides the point. BUT! What if, over the years, as this folk interpretation of surveillance-styled advertising has become more widespread, someone at Instagram (or Facebook, or whatever) heard this folk interpretation...and took it as a sort of drawing plan for somthing to actually build? an actual product stemming from an idea that the collective "we" cooked up as an urban legend?
This is almost certainly less likely than the original myth of "Instagram is listening" itself, but I'm eager to bury this capsule in the ground for a few years and see what shakes out. Please let me know if, in a few years, it turns out to be true that someone mistook the folk wisdom for reality and built a pervasive listening system based on our fever-dreamed data fears.
-Jeff, 1/25/2019