cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16562509
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Stories of these companies listening through everybody's mics are like modern day ghost stories. It definitely totally happens every single day but nobody ever manages to get a piece of hard evidence. Maybe the algorithms can sense wireshark like ghosts sense cameras
Cox Media Group got kicked off Google's ad partner program a few years ago when 404 Media scooped that they had a feature called CMG Active Listening which did exactly this. They had a slide deck Audio spying by advertisers is like doping in pro sports, everybody does it and you only get caught if you're stupid. Remember back in 2013 a whistleblowing NSA contractor told us to put our phones in the fridge if we wanted to have a secret conversation? He had a slide deck, too. The western world is run by a cult of pedophiles, the fact that our phones listen in on us without our consent is not a stretch.
So the only piece of evidence is a single mention on a low quality PowerPoint presentation from a company nobody has ever heard of. This is tinfoil hat territory
Meta / Instagram / Facebook definitely does this, they even hack your phone to get even more data.
Neither of those articles has any evidence of them secretly listening through everybody's microphone
Metaphors are just a step too far, eh?
No, they're not "listening" to audio, but their servers are definitely listening for all the data we send them.
Are you just lazy and in denial? There is traffic sent from both Alexa and Google Home every time it detects something that it considers speech, regardless of whether the wake word was detected. This is not debatable, set up your own tests.
I have Google Home and monitors on my own network, I've never seen suspicious activity. Here's somebody else doing it:
https://labs.sogeti.com/google-home-spying/
Anyone who says they aren't listening are idiots who know nothing of big tech. They are listening.
Why would they need to listen? That's a lot of processing power for information we already give them. They don't need to listen, honestly. They get more information from us than we verbally communicate.
But... why would they care? It's your energy bill, not theirs.
I think about this every time I see a random thing I have never heard of before and go to search for it and autofill has the exact phrase I wanna search after typing only 1 or 2 letters. It either reads text on the screen or listened to me say to myself "what the hell is yadda yadda?" because how else would it know I had a really good chance of searching "what is yadda yadda" after only typing "wh?" The yadda yadda part could have been anything, but it still managed to predict the exact thing I was gonna look for.