Professionals and hobbyists who analyze smart phone app behavior with APK decompilers, reverse engineering suites, personal cell towers, SDN radios, SIM dongles, mobile device emulators, etc: "Facebook apps are not listening to your conversations in the background, if they were we'd have seen it here, here, here, and here."
People with anecdata about which ads they see, who think of cell phones as inscrutable magic: "No, they definitely are. I can't (won't) think of any other way they'd infer my interests in these topics. You can't see it happening because they are too smart."
Yeah, I hate Facebook as much as anyone, but they’d have way too much to lose by deploying some sort of zero day-based hidden listening tools
I guess the financial incentive might be there for some shady ad network to do it, but that’s just so much risk to take on for such a tiny gain per infected phone..
I was talking about youtube. They do listen to show more relevant videos. I live in a very quiet household and if we say something out loud low and behold it will be in our recommended later.
Again, anecdotes are not data. YouTube is extremely good at guessing things you might be interested in, you could try being completely mute in your household and then after a week you will have to arrive at only one of two conclusions
1) YouTube can read minds and they know what you just thought about
2) with statistical data from literally billions of people it's not so weird to guess what you might be thinking about and show you a video about it.
Again, if they(your phone? Watch? Toaster?) were listening someone would have found some evidence by now, a trace of voice recordings being sent or even something that looks like it might be voice recordings. Yet we have zero. It's not happening, the much easier and much more probable explanation is that we're already tracked through every online service we ever touch, but also we are linked to people we live with or people we interact with, and for a company that possesses exabytes of data it can analyse it's easier to trawl that than try to sneak out voice recordings out of your phone.
