I agree. But everyone sure they’re not also listening to the microphone is giving them way too much credit.

If they’re not listening to the microphone, that could change any day, and cost them another billionaire’s nickel in another five or ten years.

It’s easy to disprove.

I used to say that about Meta - they’re obviously not going to Rube Goldberg levels to spy on the tiny fraction of users who run an ad blocker or a VPN.

I was wrong about that.

If your phone was listening to you and transmitting your voice data all the time, you will notice the impact on your battery and data usage. Siri.

I agree in principle, we would probably notice, because most engineer are occasionally lazy or idiotic.

But, I can think of ways to make this happen without any battery impact. Capture in a format that doesn’t need re-encoded in the moment, and wait to convert and transmit only when the phone is plugged in. Don’t even clean up the data on the phone, just trickle the highlights up to the cloud.

Then in some future version of Android, wedge in a local AI layer, and call into that to pick highlights to share with advertising partners.

Google settled out of court twice this week for spying on consumers, at a cost of about a “billionaire’s nickel” each time.

Okay. We don’t have concrete proof that they found a way to spy on our conversations, through their open source platform, and their dedicated proprietary closed hardware. I get that.

This whole conversation feels like arguing to defend an abusive uncle from one very specific violation of trust. I get it, he we can’t prove he did that one thing.

It changes nothing.