One of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone’s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a conspiracy theory that isn’t true.

ARS said, that reuters said, that users said.

Someone needs a new hobby. "Proof" from 3 layers of journalists interpreting a case that they themself said never went to court. Trying to use evidence of absence as proof will never win any hearts in a debate.

I didn't seriously believe it happened either for quite some time because confirmation bias is a bitch. But I've seen it happen a few times where it would have to be a seriously unlikely coincidence.

If it was searched for in Google, Facebook, apple, or whatever sure

If it was correlated with locality and time, sure.

You can infer a lot from a few searches but there are times where nothing was searched for and a novel concept came out of conversation and book there's ads and search completion for it.

Maybe, just maybe, someone settling a lawsuit without being found guilty, doesn't ACTUALLY mean they're innocent.

It's well possible and previously tv mic had been used as bugging device. The problem is, way too many security researchers look in system level software of iOS and even other components of the device that such practice will be too risky for apple (same applies for mainstream android products). Also processing realtime audio, finding potentially unrealiable topic from it and doing realtime ad is actually too much work as of today's tech (might change sooner than you think though).

What, I think, is more practical is to use the whole query after the wake word to show ad, and potentially use other app tracking data, which is way much reliable than voice for targeting purpose. Voice data is useful for bugging purpose, primarily (ab)used by nation states and LE.

I bet in the medical procedure case mentioned in the blog the user searched/talked about that in other apps and average people aren't good to notice these privacy leaks.

I'm always torn on this topic because, yeah there's hundreds of biases that can be attributed to this phenominon.

IE something becomes a popular topic in your area. Meaning more people in the area start searching the topic in that area, thus advertisers start pushing it to that location.

Obviously ads are also tracking you in 100 ways on what you've searched for, looked at etc... which means it could have a good guess of what you are going to talk about, before you do.

But at the same time, I think everyone can think of a lot of stories of things that just seemed to perfect, to out of the blue. For me the big one was 10 years ago when I walked into an attic, said "man it's fucking dark up here", opened my phone, and a big ad for a flashlight app popped up.

On Android, I have the mic, location, and camera blocked via the pulldown tiles menu. I turn them on when needed. The OS and some apps like to bitch about this sometimes but it seems to be working ok.

My iphone does not offer these blanket blocking options. It's a work phone, so I just leave it off unless I need it.

People always talk about getting served ads after they talk about something. I think it's the other way around. The ads put the thought into your brain and then you start talking about it and notice after you've already been thinking about it for a while.

This is a great case of confirmation bias, too. The one time your ad happens to match a conversation you had earlier, you’ll be convinced forever, and tell everyone you know about it. The ten million other times you have a conversation that doesn’t appear in your ads will go unnoticed.