I still don’t believe audio surveillance exists at this scale, and I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence.

It seems to me that Facebook is extremely good at targeting me with ads (via Instagram) for products I might be interested in. I’m also much more likely to talk about products I’m interested in. I’m also much more likely to notice the spooky scenarios where the ads match what I was talking about, but not so likely to notice the ads unrelated to my conversations.

There are so many ways we could detect such surveillance. Power consumption, network usage, mic activity indicators, etc. but I still have seen no such evidence.

What do you think could be going on?

> I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence

My feeling here is that it's just like when someone in your family buys a particular make/model of car, you start noticing the same car on the road and are surprised that you never noticed how many of them there are.

That same ad for a set of Bose headphones might show up in your feed once a week, but one of those days you just happen to have a conversation about headphones with a friend, and it feels weird.

The paranoia in me sometimes wants to believe that my phone is listening to me all the time and is extracting ad keywords from everything I say, but I have a hard time figuring out how it would work.

Uploading voice clips, even using a good compressor like Opus, would still be noticeable. Maybe not by me, personally, but someone would have noticed that by now. Doing on-device voice recognition is possible (uploads of compressed text might not be noticeable), but my intuition is that would be a huge drain on the battery if it was running all day, processing everything it hears.

But who knows. Maybe it is possible, and there's a novel, but secret technology that enables it. It's a little far-fetched, though, I think.

I had a hard time believing it myself and came to terms with it after reproducing it consistently over many months, despite using everything from pihole to on-device firewalls running as root.

Unfortunately, this topic tends to be routinely brushed off as coincidence and I believe it's partially because the level of surveillance underway would cause panic and outrage, if it becomes widely known. Although I have have exposure to adtech and ML, it's difficult to grasp how this sort of activity is being done at scale.

My current theory is audio may be heavily compressed prior to occasional uploads to a trusted domain, which could be obfuscated by cloudfront or similar service. It's also possible some on-device speech to text is happening, which would make the files trivial to upload. That said, on device ML itself would be a quite a feat, especially to be running on mobile devices with high degree of accuracy to isolate keywords to be used in prod, for ad targeting.

yet not even one whistleblower has stepped forward? Not one person has been able to detect something which would be so obviously detectable? Come on, man.