Memes of Production

Is it it though? With closed source software we don’t know what the software does.

You can track network communication, yes.

What’s stopping audio being recorded, stored locally, and only transmitted when other legitimate data is being transmitted? Hiding amongst the rest. Split up into random packets as to be obfuscated.

Where it goes, and whether or not it sends. This can all be tracked, along with the size of the data being sent. Even when split. This is all manageable with readily available tools..

This used to be the talk of paranoid tin hat conspiracy theorists without any evidence but with the amount of tech scandals, Snowden leaks, etc it’s no longer unfounded paranoia. Tech companies are nefarious, they will figure out nefarious means to get what they want.

Audio is a terrible medium - especially when they can get it from your keyboard, your browser, the apps you have installed, the social networks you're signed into, so on and so forth.

And, as I said, you can investigate this yourself. I'm hardly the only person who has actually checked. I did it for work, but others have done the same.

Edit: Let me expand briefly on "audio is a terrible medium". There are issues with:

• Background noise / audio quality
• Speech patterns and accents
• Homophones
• Picking up context
• Specialized words or uncommon words
• Punctuation is hard to detect, which drastically changes meaning in a sentence

Audio is not worth it. Its too much effort for too little information.