Facebook seeks patent on tech that turns on your smartphone microphone

To hear Facebook tell it, no one at the company is secretly using your phone's microphone to listen in on your conversations for the purpose of ad targeting.  But that doesn't mean they aren't open to the possibility.  A patent application filed by the Menlo Park-based  company details a convoluted process to trigger users' devices to record the ambient audio surrounding them — be that your conversation or the sounds in your bedroom — and then send some form of data based on that recordin...