FTC Settles With Cox Media Group and Two Others Who Lied About Using Device Microphones to Collect Ad Targeting Data ⇥ ftc.gov

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission:

The Federal Trade Commission will require Cox Media Group (CMG) and two smaller marketing firms to pay a total of $930,000 to settle allegations they deceived customers by falsely claiming to offer an AI-powered service that could target localized ads based on conversations captured from consumers’ smart devices and that consumers had opted into such targeting.

Congratulations to Joseph Cox of 404 Media who broke this story in December 2023 and a related story about MindSift and 1010 Digital, the “smaller marketing firms” who settled with the FTC. According to the FTC’s complaint (PDF), Cox Media Group continued its fraudulent marketing through mid-2024, around the time the pitch deck was leaked to Cox. All three of these companies helped to feed the conspiracy theory that apps use device microphones to collect data for ad targeting.

For what it is worth, Cox Media Group told Reuters it “relied on marketing materials provided by a third-party vendor about the vendor’s product”.

Like many conspiracy theories, elements of this story were covered without skepticism by websites like the Daily Mail and Zero Hedge. These are crank websites that hinge on unreliable narration driven by confirmation bias; yet, both happen to be extremely popular, particularly among those who immerse themselves in conspiracy thinking. Because companies like Cox Media Group misrepresented how they collect information and took advantage of the relatively widespread suspicion that devices are listening to everything we say for ad targeting purposes, it undermines our ability to have a reasonable discussion about the actual ways in which they are ruining our privacy. From the FTC’s press release:

According to the complaints, this service did not, in fact, listen in on consumers’ conversations or use voice data at all — nor did the service accurately place ads in customers’ desired locations. Instead, the service the companies provided consisted of reselling — at a significant markup — email lists obtained from other data brokers.

Of course that is what Cox Media Group was doing. Not only does this settlement clarify this whole audio-based-ad-targeting narrative is nonsense, it also shows the power of the normalized yet still invasive practices of data brokers and ad tech. The damage done by Cox Media Group is that it is harder to have this conversation because they have poisoned the well. Meanwhile, anyone who is clinging to the conspiracy theory might point to this settlement as evidence of a cover-up — if crank websites cover this settlement at all. As of writing, I could not find it on either the Daily Mail or Zero Hedge.