So Supernatural - DARK WEB: The Underbelly of Facebook

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

It began as a college directory. Two decades later, Facebook holds one of the most detailed records of human behavior ever assembled — who you know, where you go, what you're drawn to, and what you're likely to do next. The company insists it isn't listening through your microphone. But it’s not fighting the rest: invisible pixels that follow you across sites, a location trail it can reconstruct even after you switch tracking off, and data gathered on people who never signed up for an account at all.For a full list of sources, please visit: https://sosupernaturalpodcast.com/dark-web-the-underbelly-of-facebookDid you know you can listen to So Supernatural ad-free? Join the Crime Junkie Fan Club! Visit to view the current membership options and policies.So Supernatural is an Audiochuck and Crime House production. Find us on social!Instagram: @sosupernaturalpodTwitter: _sosupernaturalFacebook: /sosupernaturalpod Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's happened to all of us. You mentioned something once out loud in passing, and within hours, it's in your social media feed. This just happened to me and honestly happens to me on the regular. I was talking to my wife about booking a trip to her hometown in Argentina. I didn't search for it. I didn't type it. I just set it out loud to her.

And by dinner time, my iPhone was showing me flight deals to, you guessed it, Argentina. Coincidence? Maybe. But I will say I'm a firm believer in what our dear friend astrologer Alisa Kelly likes to live by. T-A-N-C. There are no coincidences. It's almost enough to make you wonder if your computer and your phone are spying on you. Well, there have been conspiracy theories going around for years, almost since Facebook was invented, claims that the social media site can hack your phone's microphone, listen to your private conversations, and then send you targeted ads. For the record, Facebook has always denied those claims. They insist they don't hack your microphone, they don't spy on you, and they use other tools to make sure their ads are super

personalized. But what their parent company, meta, has been allegedly developing instead. Well, that might be something far more unsettling than a hacked microphone. I'm Yvette Jindelae. And I'm her sister, Rasha Pecorero. Welcome back to So Supernatural. Okay, let's admit it. We all spend way more time on social media than we should. I know I do. Here in the United States, the average TikTok user spends one hour on the app every single day. But if you only focus on teenagers, that rate jumps up to 90 minutes per day. Given that there's 2.2 billion TikTok users across the world, that adds up to a whole lot of hours. Then there's Instagram. That site has a whopping 3 billion active users. 90% of them log in at least once a day to post something. And after the upload,

those people spend about a half an hour just scrolling. I got to say, I'm solo on Instagram. and honestly, I think it's definitely it's great for business and for casually keeping up with, you know, my sister, my family, and my friends. But I don't think it's healthy to get caught up in it for hours because as we all know, social media isn't always what it appears to be. And I definitely have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with social media. I mean, there are the definite positives, yes, but there are also plenty of negatives. At the end of the day, I truly believe intimate, genuine social relationships are pivotal to the human experience, especially for the younger generation. I mean, this is just my opinion, Rasha. You know, we could go on and on about social media and our differences about it.

That's very, very true. And if any of you follow me and Yvette on social media, you know who is the more active on social media out of the two. And I definitely have always had a love relationship with social media, to be honest. I feel that it's a way to stay connected when you're not physically together. Now, I know a lot of the younger demographics have sort of forgotten about Facebook. It's more of a millennial plus thing. And as we all know, I am an avid Instagram user, but I do cross-post everything to Facebook. I think a lot of us do.

But the truth is that Facebook is still incredibly popular. As of May 26, over 2 billion people worldwide said they still use Facebook every single day. If you count those who check it at least once a month, that number jumps up to 3 billion. And like the other apps, most of those people aren't just popping in, glancing at their news feeds, and just moving on. It's normal to scroll and scroll and scroll. We all know it's a problem, that it's incredibly addictive and full of AI and a lot of misinformation. In spite of all of that, we can't stop using it. It almost feels inescapable at this point, but it wasn't always that way.

That's right. Facebook went live on February 4, 2004. And as shocking as it sounds, the website had a reputation for being very private and secure at first. You couldn't create an account unless you were a Harvard student at the time. No alumni, no students at other schools, and unlike today, there was no news feeds, no photo albums, no groups. Facebook was more like a fancy online phone book. You could see people's names and their one single profile picture, but you couldn't do much else. The upside was that nobody had to worry about future hiring managers, family,

members or strangers on the internet judging their photos and status. But over the course of the year, Facebook slowly evolved. They let people upload multiple photos at once. They could post statuses and other people could write on their friend's walls. The layout was still very simple compared to Facebook today. But there were hints of what the website would eventually become. Over the first several months, that evolution was still very exclusive. You still had to be a college student and only certain universities were allowed on the platform. It wasn't just limited to Harvard anymore. It started with the Ivy League.

Then the site expanded to other schools that were considered prestigious. And eventually, it worked its way to less exclusive or less well-known institutions. By 2005, high school students were allowed to create accounts. The following year, anyone, yourself included, could sign up. That's also when the news feed launched, meaning your updates wouldn't just stay on your own profile. They'd be broadcast to everyone on your friends list. So a ton of teenagers and young adults suddenly had to scramble to hide photo albums full of their sometimes reckless behavior. Mainly because they didn't want their parents or their coworkers knowing exactly what they'd been up to.

And this was the beginning of a much bigger, more serious pattern. One where people would post on Facebook thinking their information was private, then they'd learned that the data wasn't as secure as they'd thought. Their info was being shared with all kinds of people. For example, in the fall of 2007, Facebook introduced a new feature. It was part of a partnership with certain online stores like Blockbuster or Zappos. And yes, that is a blast from the past. But if you bought something on one of those websites, an update would automatically get posted to your news feed.

It would say something like, Yvette just bought tickets to Spider-Man 3 on Fandango. In theory, yes, it seems like a good marketing move. If people see what their friends are buying, they might go out and buy those things too. I mean, it's an ad that doesn't feel like it's an ad, right? The problem was, Facebook and those companies never told anyone about the new feature.

They didn't ask permission to track their purchases, and they didn't get anybody's consent before posting automatically. Well, a man named Sean Lane told a few news outlets how this affected him personally. One day he went on to Overstock.com to buy a Christmas gift for his wife. He found a diamond ring on sale and bought it. A few seconds later, his Facebook status updated. It said, quote, Sean Lane bought 14-carat, white. gold diamond eternity flower ring from overstock.com. Of course, he was friends with his wife on Facebook, so she saw the post and knew exactly

what she was getting and the Christmas surprise was ruined. And yes, I know that might sound very trivial, but the point is, the stakes could have been so much higher. What if someone was buying, I don't know, say a pregnancy test or something? Some purchases are meant to be kept private for a reason. Agreed. But more importantly, Facebook broke anti-spying laws in the state of California, so it got slapped with a class action lawsuit, and Sean, the diamond ring buying husband, became the face of the suit. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, offered a public apology,

but they still lost the case. In 2009, the courts ruled that the social media platform had to pay $9.5 million in a class action settlement. And maybe they didn't learn their lesson because just two years later in May of 2011, Facebook had yet another privacy scandal. When Facebook launched, its privacy policy ensured that people's information would stay on Facebook. They said they wouldn't share that data with any third parties,

which matters because private. Data should be just that, private. Now, I know what you might be thinking. Well, I have nothing to hide. What do I care? But consider what that data actually contains. An app that tracks your location knows when you visit a doctor's office, how often, and how long you stay. From that alone, it can make educated guesses about your health conditions and the treatments you

might be receiving. Your browsing history can reveal your political beliefs. your financial anxieties, your relationship status, the newsletters you subscribe to, the searches you make at 2 o'clock in the morning. Do you want people to know what you're Googling in the middle of the night? I know I don't. I definitely don't. So, yeah, privacy is good.

But those policies started to shift by 2007. At that time, Facebook was adding on a new feature. Games and quizzes people could play through their profiles. Do you guys remember Words with Friends, that online version of Scrabble, or how about Farmville, where you work with others to run a virtual farm? The apps were just like mobile games, but for this version, you had to be on Facebook to play, and you could invite people on your friends list to join. The problem was that Facebook hadn't created those game apps on their website. They were all made by third-party companies. And whenever someone installed one of those games,

the companies could see their info, their name, their birthday, their home address, and the schools that they attended. In October 2010, news broke that the companies running those games could see private information. And not just for people who'd signed up to play the games, almost everybody on Facebook was exposed. In 2011, the United States Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, formally charged Facebook with eight separate privacy violations, including deceiving users about their ability to control their own personal data.

Facebook agreed to a settlement. And they promised to do better. But of course, they didn't. It only took a few more years before Facebook got sued again for selling users' private data. And as you can imagine, on and on it went to the point where the fines started coming and they were big, like $5 billion big, the largest fine ever imposed on any company for privacy violations in history. And one of the largest penalties the U.S. government had ever assessed for any violation of any kind. So why keep stepping in it? Why keep doing it over and over again?

because the reward far outweighed the risk. It sounds huge, but the $5 billion fine was only 9% of Facebook's revenue for that year alone. Can you imagine? That's for one year. One year. The thing is, we can't cover every single controversy in Facebook's history, but there is one we want to unpack at length, because it showed what Facebook could actually do with this story.

stolen data. And to all appearances, they were influencing the way that people voted in major elections. In 2015, Facebook hosted some apps from a group called Cambridge Analytica. They were a consultancy firm that worked for political campaigns. Imagine you're running for office. You want to post a campaign ad online, but you only want to show it to people who might actually vote for you. There's no point in advertising to people who disagree with your platform or who don't live in your district. So that's where Cambridge Analytica came in. Their app didn't seem inherently political. It was full of fun quizzes, but when people signed up to those quizzes, Cambridge Analytica could collect all sorts of information about people, their age, sex, gender, race, shopping habits, home address, the list go

on and on. And it's worth noting they didn't only get information about people who signed up for the app. Cambridge Analytica also got information from everyone on a user's friends list. Tons of people had never consented for Cambridge Analytica to know anything about them. But still, 87 million people were affected. After they gathered all of this data, the company could make an edge of the company could make an edge of educated guests about each user's political beliefs. For example, the firm said some people were more inclined to worry or feel pessimistic about the future. So Cambridge Analytica pushed them ads claiming the country is broken and that the world is in

terrible shape. The ads said the only way to fix it was to elect their clients. Other people were more optimistic about the future. So Cambridge Analytica made ads for them, about how the U.S. is great and their clients would make sure it stayed great. Every viewer thought they were getting a full, complete picture of the candidate. But in reality, they were seeing highly targeted ads telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. It was a very big tool in the 2016 presidential race.

It's hard to say how much of an effect, if anything, their work had on the election. but a lot of people had serious concerns about the democratic process when the story broke, myself included. However, Facebook said Cambridge Analytica was violating their policies and suspended their account, but they couldn't force the consulting firm to delete the data they had already had. And arguably, they hadn't done enough to prevent this from happening in the first place, which is why Facebook got hit with another class action lawsuit in 2018. They settled out of court for $725 million. And it's not just Facebook you have to be wary of.

It's the people using it too. On July 12, 2018, news broke that hackers could figure out who belonged to private Facebook groups. These included support groups for people with certain medical conditions, those in the LGBTQIA plus community and members of other minority groups. And this honestly freaks me out because I've been a member of every single one of these support groups on Facebook. Well, as you can imagine, this sparked a lot of criticism from people who felt like they might be discriminated against. They could get passed over for promotions at work, their friends and family members could treat them differently. If they lived in a place that didn't have legal protections for gay or trans people, they could even

lose their homes or their civil rights. And it gets worse, because some hackers won't stop at learning your name, your sexual orientation, or your medical information. Some run highly coordinated, personalized scams, like in this story of an 86-year-old woman living in the Cincinnati, Ohio area. We'll call her Valerie. On July 29, 2006, Valerie got a call from an unknown number. When she answered, the caller said that he was a lawyer representing Valerie's grandson, who'd been arrested earlier that day. He was currently in jail, and he wouldn't be released until someone paid his $8,500 bail. Valerie knew her grandson was a good kid. She didn't want him rotting away in a jail cell, but she didn't have $8,500 bucks on hand. Plus, on top of that,

She didn't drive so she couldn't go to the bank on her own. When she told the lawyer all of this, he said that he was going to send a driver to pick Valerie up and take her to the bank. Then she could withdraw the money to help her grandson out. A car showed up outside her house a little while later, with a driver in a very nice suit. He took her to the bank, waited while she took out almost $10,000 in cash, and then she handed it over.

Valerie even described this man as incredibly sweet and helpful. But later that day, Valerie told her daughter Marjorie about what had happened. And Marjorie said none of that was true. None of Valerie's grandsons had been arrested and nobody needed to be bailed out of jail. Valerie had been 100% scammed. If you think that's scary, there are even more sophisticated scams out there. Because now, con artists can get the audio from videos you've posted and feed it into an

AI that impersonates people. It can be really persuasive because the programs make the scammers sound exactly like your loved ones. Our dear friends Ashley and Britt over at Crime Junkie recently covered one of these AI scams. We're going to give you a quick overview just in case you haven't watched it or listened to it, But if you want a more in-depth look at these scams, go check out their episode. We're going to link it here in the show notes.

On January 20, 23, an Arizona woman named Jennifer DiStefano was picking up her youngest daughter from Dance when she got a call from a number she didn't recognize. Usually she didn't answer for unknown callers, but her 15-year-old daughter, Brianna, was out of town on a ski trip. And Jennifer's instincts told her she should pick up. When Jennifer answered, she heard Brianna screaming and crying. She said she'd been kidnapped on her vacation, and her abductors wouldn't let her go unless Jennifer paid a large ransom. The kidnappers didn't want Jennifer to wire the money because it could be traced. Instead, they said they were sending someone to Jennifer's home to collect cash.

Luckily, in the midst of all of this going on, another parent at the dance studio used Jennifer's other daughter's phone to call Jennifer's husband and confirm. Brianna was perfectly fine. No one had kidnapped her. No one was holding her ransom. It was all a scam. No one ever even showed up to collect the ransom. This crime junkie episode made me and my family create a family safe word

in case anything like this were to ever happen to us. It is so incredibly scary and you have to be aware of all of the these crazy scams out there right now. Yeah, I mean, there are tons of stories like this about hackers using Facebook and other social media information to scam people. But we haven't even touched on the way Facebook itself could be using your data to manipulate you. And according to several media whistleblowers,

it's getting extremely advanced to the point where it may even know how to brainwash you. According to Rebecca Lemov, an author and Harvard professor, Facebook is very good at brainwashing people. Those are her words, not ours. But Rebecca believes all social media sites can influence people or even mind control them into believing things they wouldn't otherwise. That's in part because these apps and websites can be highly addictive. Everyone's feed presents a very specific version of reality to them. It's full of news stories, influencer posts, and ads that were chosen by an algorithm to keep them scrolling. They'll also show you some videos and articles you hate and disagree with, because if you're angry and upset, you're more likely to stay online, even if it's just to argue with strangers in the comments.

And again, if you follow me or Yvette, you know we don't do that. We blah and we delete. That is how we have piece of me. mind. Yeah, true, true. Be, you know, be cautious of what you're looking at, right? Facebook's algorithm has been intentionally showing people more emotionally charged content since 2012, which can have some unintended consequences. For example, in the mid-2010s, Facebook allowed users in Myanmar to spread hateful misinformation about an ethnic minority group called the Rohek. Rohingya. The general public attitudes about the Rohingya people became worse and worse as more rumors and

conspiracy theories spread. Then in August 2017, the Myanmar military began systematically attacking the Rohingya people. They killed them, sexually assaulted them, and burned their homes and businesses. And it had to do partly with the horrible things they read on Facebook. They thought the Rohingya people deserved to be treated this way. According to a human rights organization called Amnesty International, the genocide may not have happened if not for the Facebook misinformation. They claim the site directly contributed to the death and displacement of thousands of people. There are some equally alarming stories coming out of the United States to this day.

Facebook updated its policy. in January 2025 to allow huge rollbacks to its content moderation policies. And Glad reported that's when a lot more hate speech against LGBTQIA plus people began to appear on the site. Almost immediately, the community began experiencing more aggression, both online and in the real world. When they logged on to Facebook, they'd see hateful posts about their community, and when they went out in public, they'd be harassed. assaulted, and sometimes even murdered. It's almost enough to make you want to abandon your phone and computer entirely,

but the reality is technology is not going anywhere. It's evolving faster than ever, to a point where they soon might be inside our heads, literally. In 2025, Meta announced something that sounds straight out of science fiction. They had developed a technology, that could read human thoughts. And here's how it works. When you think of a word before you type it,

a specific part of your brain activates. Different words light up in different regions and meta-figured out how to map those patterns. To do it, they ran a study with 35 participants. Each person sat inside a brain scanning machine and typed messages on a keyboard while the machine monitored their brain activity in real time. Over thousands of repetitions, researchers were able to match specific brain signals to specific words

before those words were ever typed. So think of it like your phone's autocomplete feature. When you type, how are your phone guesses you're about to write you. Meta's technology does the same thing, except you never have to touch a keyboard at all. You just think the word and the machine reads it. On its own, I mean, that's remarkable. But meta went one step further. They could take those individual signals and string them together into full sentences,

meaning the technology doesn't just read words, it can reconstruct entire thoughts. For people with disabilities who can't speak or type, this kind of technology could be life-changing, a way to communicate that requires nothing more than thought itself. But in the hands of a company with Facebook's track record, the implications are something else entirely. Spokespeople for better to say the device is only capable of analyzing one part of the brain, the one dedicated to writing. Allegedly, it can't read other thoughts, so you don't need to worry about it learning that mean thing that you thought about a friend after a big fight, or memorizing your deepest, darkest secrets.

I mean, yet. I do have to say, I've definitely wondered if Meta is listening to my conversations. Earlier we talked about the long-running conspiracy theory that they might be listening through your phone's microphone. The social media site has always denied those rumors, but some stories we heard about this subject seem downright eerie. For example, one night in 2015, a reporter named Caitlin Tiffany was out with a friend, who will call Beth. They were planning to have dinner together at Caitlin's apartment, but first they

stopped by a local grocery store to pick up some beers. The store was stocked with lots of brands that Caitlin and Beth had never heard of before. So they spent a while picking up bottles and cans, reading the labels, and trying to figure out which one sounded good. Finally, they settled on something familiar and safe, a six-pack of Stella. Beth and Caitlin paid for it, then headed to the apartment, and while Caitlin was prepping for dinner, Beth did what all of us do, opened Instagram to kill some time. Right away, she saw an ad for one of the beer brands she and Caitlin had just been discussing at the store, one they didn't buy. Neither of them had heard of it before that shopping trip, and they never Googled it before. And yet, somehow, Instagram knew to show her

an ad for that exact brand. I got to say that story reminds me of an anonymous post that I found on Reddit by someone I'm going to call Wanda. One day in 2022, Wanda woke up with a horrible pain in her neck. She figured that she had slept on it wrong, but she didn't think she was seriously hurt, so she didn't bother to Google her symptoms or call her doctor. She did mention it to her roommate, though. And the very next time she opened Facebook, she saw an ad for a device that is supposed to relieve neck pain.

Well, here's the thing. Facebook's official stance is they don't listen through your phone's microphone to help them target ads. Because they don't have to. Instead, they can track what you do when you're not using their site. So if you walk into a grocery store and walk to the liquor aisle, they might use that information. They can also see your shopping history. If they know you once bought a cheap mattress that causes neck pain, they can also predict that you might wake up one day feeling sore.

So they'll show you ads for devices that help relax your neck. Officially, and I'm saying that in air quotes here, officially there's nothing supernatural going on, at least not right now. But it's hard to be sure, especially because there are also a lot of rumors and conspiracy theories, about another feature, the suggested friends list. And I have to say this has happened to me more times than I can count. There's a feature that shows you profiles of people you may know in real life, but you haven't added as a friend or follower yet, and that is the suggested friends list.

Sometimes it's obvious why it's making a particular recommendation. If someone went to the same school as you or if you have a lot of mutuals in common, it's safe to assume you could know one another. But some suggestions are seriously wild to me, like this one story we found on Reddit from 2021. A man will call Dev was out in public when he struck up a conversation in real life with a complete stranger on the street.

They didn't exchange contact information or even their full names. It was more of a quick, hi, how are you know, a weather-type conversation. Well, a few days later, Dev logged on to Facebook, and the man from the street was on his suggested friends list. There was nothing connecting them, no shared job or school, no friends in common, but somehow Facebook knew that they had met in real life.

A woman who will call Deborah shared a similar story in January of 26. In a public Facebook post, she wrote that on the evening of January 17th, she had a very vivid dream. It featured a man who she didn't recognize. The next day, she went on Facebook and saw the exact same man on her suggested friends list. Deborah clicked on his profile and realized they'd actually gone to the same high school together. They knew each other as teenagers, but they were never close friends. Facebook probably suggested him as a possible connection because of that history.

But Deborah couldn't help but wonder how she was. she'd ended up dreaming about him the night before. I mean, and as you can imagine, she was shaken by how weird it was that Facebook made this recommendation right after this guy appeared in her dreams. I mean, WTF. Yeah, I mean, there's, there is no way logically to explain this. No. None at all.

And officially, Facebook uses a ton of data to figure out who you might know in real life from your contact list or your emails to your friends of your friends, but from your dreams? Like, what is that about? It can also track your location. So in Dev's case, the algorithm may have noticed he and the other man were standing close to one another for a long time, and from that, it deduced that they'd met one another

and would want to connect online. But there is no way to explain Deborah's story. I mean, none. Not unless Facebook has some secret dream reading technology that we don't know about yet. We also need to point out other social media networks have problems of their own. Like Instagram, which I love more than life, which is also owned by Meta, Facebook's parent company, meaning it has a lot of the same privacy issues as Facebook itself. Then, of course, there's TikTok.

The app was originally created in China. but in early 2026, an American private equity group took over. This group has ties to major federal officials. So, many people have concerns about how the U.S. government and individual politicians will use people's private data. Snapchat advertises itself as a safe messaging app, but tech experts say they do a bad job of storing personal data as well. And it would be very easy for hackers to get at it if they wanted.

Even Pinterest has been accused of excessive tracking. The truth is social media isn't going anywhere. And in all honesty, every app, website, and program comes with its hidden risks. Plus, many of them are also developing new technology that could be even more invasive. Like how meta has a new line of smart glasses that look like ordinary eyeglasses. But when you're wearing them, you can film whatever you're looking. at, and they also have an AI component. If you're, say, trying to read a menu in a foreign country, your glasses can translate into English for you, which I got to say that is pretty

cool, or even tell you which dish has the most positive reviews online. Look, at the end of the day, humanity created social media. And like its creators, social media isn't inherently good or bad. It can bring us together, help us share information, and raise awareness about important issues. It can also do the polar opposite. But maybe, instead of waiting for these apps and websites to do the right thing, we just need to be smarter about how we use them. That means checking your privacy settings, evaluating your follower list, only following creators who bring you joy. And remembering, life is. isn't about how many likes you get. It's really about friendship, true connection, love, and above all

else, hope for a better tomorrow. This is So Supernatural, an audio check original produced by Crimehouse. You can connect with us on Instagram at So SupernaturalPod and visit our website at so supernaturalpodcast.com. Join Rasha and me next Friday for an all-new episode. Chuck would approve.