Ask HN: Is it true our phones listen to us?

I found this article a while back, but I don’t know the details because I haven’t paid to read the article. You might be able to find more details on the same story from a different source, I don’t know. https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...

somehow you never hear stories where they talked about a singer and _didn’t_ see an ad for that singer’s concert?

1. many modern smartphones can be configured (and are configured, by default) to listen for keywords like "ok google" to start a search. So if this is enabled, then technically, yes, your phone is always listening 2. I think that there's a lot of serendipity involved in the stories. Sure, there's malware, and I 100% don't trust that facebook isn't constantly listening if mic is enabled, because I don't trust meta at all, but I think that a lot of the time, people notice the subsequent ad or whatever because the topic is still on their mind, and don't notice all the stuff they see that's _not_ relevant to what they were talking about.