I used to read the Washington Post back when they ran articles like this one:<p>> "NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls, By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani March 18, 2014"<p>> "The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden."<p>Those days are long gone, however. This is most likely linked to other interesting news, i.e. the NSA awarded AWS (owned by the owner of the WaPo) a $10 billion contract in Aug 2021 (and before that CIA gave a $0.6 billion contract to AWS). The purchase price of the WaPo was $0.25 billion or so. Check out that return on investment!<p>Basically, the WaPo is serving as the CIA/NSA propaganda arm and the rewards to the paper's owner are not unsurprising. Remember Big Brother Loves You... and such vast snooping powers would never be turned against the American people by a corrupt gang of insider criminals...
One might think it does. More than often experienced that situation where talking with some friend about a topic will be the first suggestion match in google when doing a search for knowledge gaining.
Or, some apps react to special frequencies during advertisements in tv.
Moreover, YouTube videos get analyzed for Keywords. Try to find that guy who did an experiment, recorded some video where he's just holding signs with written comments on them. 2 Days later he get advertising for a keyword he had written on one of the signs displayed - strange.<p>Very strange. OF COURSE they're listening and watching.<p>But it also could just a big misunderstanding and just pure statistics and the fact that within all the distributed information on a "map", there might be local densities which not only could be mapped to certain parameters/features like device/IDs/accounts/time/user history, but also to bordered locations with all the individuals within pooled together. Imo, The possibility is pretty high that at the same time googleing individuals will google something which can be described as location and time aware induced googleing.
Unless you deactivated Siri or Ok Google your phone is definitively listening to you and people around you.<p>The audio isn't leaving the phone but a text transcript probably is.<p>I don't trust closed source software owned by quasi monopolies to do the right thing instead of what will maximize their profits / control over users.