[ericmcer]

I have always been dubious of this because:

Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened.

It would be really expensive to send, transcribe and then analyze every single human on earth. Even if you were able to do it for insanely cheap ($0.02/hr) every device is gonna be sending hours of talking per day. Then you have to somehow identify "who" is talking because TV and strangers and everything else is getting sent, so you would need specific transcribers trained for each human that can identify not just that the word "coca-cola" was said, but that it was said by a specific person.

So yeah if you managed to train specific transcribers that can identify their unique users output and then you were willing to spend the ~0.10 per person to transcribe all the audio they produce for the day you could potentially listen to and then run some kind of processing over what they say. I suppose it is possible but I don't think it would be worth it.

[amatecha]

Google literally just settled for $68m about this very issue https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/26/google-pr...

> Google agreed to pay $68m to settle a lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant spied inappropriately on smartphone users, violating their privacy.

Apple as well https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/03/apple-sir...

[monocularvision]

“Google denied wrongdoing but settled to avoid the risk, cost and uncertainty of litigation, court papers show.”

I keep seeing folks float this as some admission of wrongdoing but it is not.

[romanows]

The next sentence under the headline is "Tech company denied illegally recording and circulating private conversations to send phone users targeted ads".

[dieortin]

That one is about incorrect activations, not about spying on anyone

[orbital-decay]

Those lawsuits are not about continuous background spying at all

[jmholla]

> Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened.

You don't have to stream the audio. You can transcribe it locally. And it doesn't have to be 100% accurate. As for user identify, people have mentioned it on their phones which almost always have a one-to-one relationship between user and phone, and their smart devices, which are designed to do this sort of distinguishing.

[Mogzol]

Transcribing locally isn't free though, it should result in a noticeable increase in battery usage. Inspecting the processes running on the phone would show something using considerable CPU. After transcribing the data would still need to be sent somewhere, which could be seen by inspecting network traffic.

If this really is something that is happening, I am just very surprised that there is no hard evidence of it.

[caminante]

Even the parent's envelope math is approachable.

With their assumptions, you can log the entire globe for $1.6 billion/day (= $0.02/hr * 16 awake hours * 5 billion unique smartphone users). This is the upper end.

[intended]

I have a weird and unscientific test, and at the very least it is a great potential prank.

At one point I had the misfortune to be the target audience for a particular stomach churning ear wax removal add.

I felt that suffering shared is suffering halved, so decided to test this in a park with 2 friends. They pulled out their phones (an Android and a IPhone) and I proceeded to talk about ear wax removal loudly over them.

Sure enough, a day later one of them calls me up, aghast, annoyed and repelled by the add which came up.

This was years ago, and in the UK, so the add may no longer play.

However, more recently I saw an ad for a reusable ear cleaner. (I have no idea why I am plagued by these ads. My ears are fortunately fine. That said, if life gives you lemons)

[bspammer]

> At one point I had the misfortune to be the target audience for a particular stomach churning ear wax removal add.

So isn’t it possible that your friend had the same misfortune? I assume you were similar ages, same gender, same rough geolocation, likely similar interests. It wouldn’t be surprising that you’d both see the same targeted ad campaign.

[idiotsecant]

who says you need to transcribe everything you hear? You just need to monitor for certain high-value keywords. 'OK, Google' isnt the only thing a phone is capable of listening for.