The pitch for "Active Listening," an AI-powered advertising service that listened to consumers' real-world conversations through their smartphones and smart speakers and delivered targeted ads to those people within precise geographic areas, with consumers consent, was extremely compelling, but until it wasn't really what it claimed.

The Federal Trade Commission will require Cox Media Group 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.

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