(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)
To start off, I'm not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don't care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.
So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.
Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, "How to record Netflix shows" & "Why can't you screen record Netflix". THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.
I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.
Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.
I don’t doubt you, but it’s worth asking if your reasons for stating that our phones don’t listen to us 24/7 haven’t changed since you first formed the opinion.
Lots of things are meso-facts (a true fact at rhetorical time we learn it, but no longer true later). Tech moves quickly. It’s worth not assuming anyone is right here, & asking: under what conditions could our phones be listening (enough to produce what OP experienced)?
But again, what I’m getting at here is, are we so sure it takes all that much anymore. Processing could take place in a shorter way now, more than it could when our current opinion was still true.
Watchdog groups have been monitoring these services for years now and have yet to find the "your phone is listening 24/7" smoking gun.
Similarly before dieselgate, Volkswagen cars had been emissions tested for years without finding anything suspicious. Turned out VW used the car's sensors to detect when it was being tested. A phone can notice when it's in the hands of a security expert and start acting normal.
The conditions would be that all the controls that are in place to prevent it from happening are bypassed, which no one has proven yet. For example, Apple has developed their devices (assuming not jailbroken) in such a way where the camera and microphone usage indicators are hardwired and can't easily be bypassed by software hacks. So if your phone was listening to you all the time, then the microphone indicator light would always be on. Listening 24/7 would also drain the phone's battery and would be noticeable. Another example is Siri. It is actually designed in a way where there are 2 components. The first one is local on the phone and separate from the actual Siri component. It is what's actively listening for you to call it. Once you call it, it then activates the actual Siri that transmits your voice inputs online.
People saying it hurts battery usage, sends crazy amounts of network etc don't seem to use the latest features from Google.
Now playing, Adaptive audio are some features of android system that Google has given in recent years which listen to our microphones all the time and serve their purpose. I have used them in the past, although it said it consumes battery, I never experienced huge battery brain. Google also says these services work on device and never leaves the device, but I assume extracting few words from my audio and sending them to their servers at frequent times wouldn't be such a technically demanding process like everyone are stating here on this post. It entirely possible and probably happening.
Thank you, this is the kind of detail I was hoping someone would describe, no sarcasm. To be specific, too, this is all probably easier on Androids / jailbroken iPhones