Do our phones listen to our conversations? The answer is complicated.

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 and reputational damage if 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.
- a phone with a voice assistant enabled has to listen all the time
  Yes, but this doesn't happen online. Your voice is not constantly being sent to Amazon or Google servers for activating the voice assistant. It's an offline feature that only reacts to the specific word. That's also the reason why you can't change the activation word.
- I’ve never enabled voice shit and never will. Even if it’s all on-device on my phone. If I’m forced to, it’s back to a SideKick.
- You don't have to even disable it, just turn off voice commands. You can still activate it by pushing a button. Personally Ive been using Bing chat over Google assistant for a few months now.
- I've tried everything to try get rid of google's voice assistant on my phone, stripped it right back and disabled it and then went into the settings in google and my phone but still every time I turn on my wireless headphones it always pops up. It's doing my head in, why can't I stop it!
Give me a way to physically shut off the microphone (like a camera shield on business laptops), then we will talk.
Strange topics had popped up in my Google feed after l spoke to someone about something I've never googled before
- Right but if THEY Googled it, and Google knows that you share a connection (they do), they can recommend stuff to you based on that.
  There’s no need for them to listen to your conversations to do this. As someone else said, think of how often you talk about something and DON’T get advertisements for it.
- Same here. If I go to a house with a football game or tv show blasting, the next day I see news related to this. It is not something I have googled.
- If you disable the microphone, you would also need to disable the vibrator, speaker, and accelerometer, all of which can be used as makeshift microphones.
- It's happened to me as well... When I started talking more about Free Software and security, the advertisements on my phone all showed me cybersecurity software or services to "ensure my privacy". It freaks me out too when Discord randomly opens and I get invited to some AR headset Discord server called "Kokomo"
  Aruba, Jamaica, oh I know where I never want to take her now 😵‍💫
Coughnsacough
- Whether anyone is manually connecting to specific phones to listen in live to conversations is a very different topic. I'd say it's a more important one then whether Google are recording everything so they can advertise things at you.
  But yeah, that's not what this article is about.
- The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense
  So, is the United States Department of Defense interested in some random dudes in Belgium, or Namibia? That US-centrism is sickening sometimes.
Dude my phone will ever now then turn on and say "I didn't understand you" meaning something or someone turned on the mic to listen.
- That happens when it mis-hears a trigger word. You can enable and audible 'ping' noise to play when you activate Google Assistant. It's in the accessibility settings. Worth doing so you know when it's actually been triggered.

The messed up part is that it should not be complicated at all. It should be simply "no." And it isn't, so we have a problem

It is essentially a no. Read the article.
- Okay, I read the article. It isn’t “essentially” a no. It’s “let’s believe that google and apple wouldn’t let this data be misused.”
  As well as several paragraphs about a three-person study (wtf), and an inconclusive one, for no apparent reason other than to underscore “we just don’t know”. Then they give paragraphs over to Apple and Google for them to repeat their claims that everything’s just fine-and that’s it. That’s the article.
  So it’s “essentially no” if you believe google wouldn’t harvest your data or that intelligence agencies and hackers can’t or wouldn’t listen in.
  TL;DR, go into the Privacy settings of your phone and disable everything that uses it - that’s the best you can do.

Are we talking about data science??

There needs to be strict regulation on models used specifically for user manipulation and advertising. Through statistics, these guys know more about you than you do. That's why it feels like they are listening in.

Can we have more focus and education around data analysis and public influence? Right now the majority of people don't even know there is a battle of knowledge and influence that they are losing.

Lemmy is a bunch of privacy-ignorant dorks. This post is just going to attract more of the dummies.

No it's not. No. This place is the fox news for the left and privacy crazies. You people have done more harm to privacy with your boy who cried wolf bullshit than anybody else. Constant misrepresentation, baseless claims, and constant red flags which have eroded any credibility there message had left.

one of the test participants, who talked repeatedly about Volvo, did report that they were bombarded by advertising for the brand. This person did not even own a car, nor had they searched the Internet to buy a Volvo or any other kind of car.
- This has happened to me and my colleagues as well. You have a conversation and within hours, ads for things mentioned in the conversion shows up on web sites as ads.
  It was pretty scary the first time, but it has been going on so long that it seems normal now also.
  Fuck big tech.
- Oh right, they definitely found so super secret spying functionally that armies of security researcher have missed. They must be super hackers or some shit 🤦‍♂️