[newswasboring]

I have acknowledged that my reasoning is less sound than the occam's razor, and I didn't really assert data impropriety. So calm down.

But about your first point. I don't think even the designers and maintainers of this blackbox understand the system. Looking at it from that point of view, the chances of a hacker finding proof for this is pretty low.

[IX-103]

The thing is you can disapprove one piece without understanding the whole system.

It would be pretty easy to show that a) sound is not being continually recorded and streamed over the internet and b) the device is not using enough processing power to decode speech. Both have been done, so this is veering into conspiracy theory territory.

[TeMPOraL]

FWIW, streaming voice over the Internet isn't required for this attack - all the software needs is to send a few bytes long tag indicating the topic of an overheard conversation.

The processing power required for this isn't big either - remember that 12+ years ago Microsoft Windows shipped with a speech recognition system that was in many ways better than what the phones currently offer, and worked off-line and with almost unnoticeable performance penalty. And if you're interested in probabilistic reporting ("there's 86% I've heard a word matching this tag in the last hour..."), you can relax performance requirements even further.

So, out of the things you mention, the only somewhat convincing piece of evidence would be that the apps in question are not accessing microphone in the background.

[newswasboring]

My dude! we are talking past each other. I am not asserting data handling impropriety. That is not what concerns me. What concerns me is they are letting these black box systems emotionally manipulate me.