[Cacti]

You can't imagine a less sinister explanation other than Facebook or some other entity is secretly recording your voice and the voices of millions of people, in violation of numerous state and federal laws, through their smartphone microphones, uploading it to their servers surreptitiously, performing voice analysis on it to determine who is speaking out of 350,000,000 possible cases (presumably they've already cataloged everyone in the country somehow?), and then use that to serve you more targeted advertising?!

I mean, really?

[zwtaylor]

True, it seems far-fetched at first. We should keep in mind that a even few short years ago theorizing about the US Government operating a widespread domestic electronic surveillance dragnet was still the realm of delusional conspiracy theorists.

[gaius]

I remember the days when we thought archiving Usenet was technically impossible... Then DejaNews announced they'd been doing it for years already...

[Cacti]

I don't see how that matters. Besides, people have been discussing widespread, domestic electronic surveillance for decades far outside conspiracy fringes. The Clipper chip, as just one example, was a big deal at the time and received widespread, mainstream coverage.

[smashingfiasco]

I mean, they did break iOS platform rules and pulled some tricks to keep the app open in the background all of the time by sending an empty audio beffer to the phone for "playback."

So yes, really.

[fergie]

Not sure if it is so far fetched to do some lightweight voice analysis (client side) and store significant terms in the same way that you would store search history.