I don’t know why people keep thinking that phones are listening in on every conversation just so they can advertise ‘Volvo’ at you.

• they don’t need to - we give them loads of data voluntarily based on location data, what we search for, things we buy, things we ‘like’ on social media…

• they’d be stung for huge fines of caught doing it.

• it’d take enormous storage and processing power to manage all that data.

• Just think about how many things you talk about every day that you’ve never then seen an advert for (confirmation bias)

• my Google Home can’t understand me when I’m actually talking directly at it asking it a question, so the idea it can seripticiously pick out words while listening through my pocket is implausible.

A few things are very clear: 1. a phone with a voice assistant enabled has to listen all the time and 2. in order to train the voice assistant the data sometimes needs to be sent to the cloud and listened to by humans.

What is less clear is does this data ever get used for advertising. As you stated there are a number of reasons that make this unlikely.

Simple solution: disable your voice assistant. I do this today and I do not feel like I am losing anything. That said, with the pace AI is improving I can forsee a day when I would feel like I have to enable my voice assistant or I am losing some key functionality of my expensive smart phone service.

If manufacturers are to be believed, the only thing that our devices are always listening for is the trigger word. iPhones have a dedicated piece of hardware or circuit or smth that listens only for ‘hey siri’ and it doesn’t start keeping record until it’s heard that. After which it sends what you say to the cloud to understand what you said.

Yes, exactly. And in order to improve the ability to understand the wake word, they need to occasionally send data to the cloud when there is some indication there may have been a misunderstanding. Also, sometimes humans need to listen when the computer has low confidence.

And of course everything after the wake word goes to the cloud. And sometimes it thinks it hears the wake word when it did not. This goes to the cloud and a human may need to interpret it.

So, some things your phone hears will go to the cloud without the wake word. And humans sometimes listen to them. This is pretty clear. Is this malicious or nefarious? Probably not. But it is complex and hard for unsophisticated end users to understand. And the reality is your phone absolutely does 110% spy on you. Just not by listening to you. It is easy to understand why so many people refuse to believe their voice assistants are not spying on them.