[glangdale]

We've (my wife and I) had a few odd ones like this too. That being said, no-one has substantiated this - which, to me, doesn't mean as much as people thinks it does.

Suppose you were building this capability. Would you necessarily leave it on 100% of the time, and if someone started acting 'weird' around their phone ("hey, I'm sitting in a lab, and someone is just talking to me a lot") it might be a good time to turn off the capability.

Plenty of malware knows to turn itself off when someone has Wireshark installed (or a number of other "tells" that the malware can get that you might be running on a security researcher's machine). Even simply running microphone-based data gathering infrequently might be enough to confound a journalist or researcher with limited time budget.

[xtracto]

Reminds me of Volkswagen cheating function: if it detected the car was on the lab, it changed its behaviour to pollute less. So... it's very feasible for any other company to do a similar thing.

Now otoh as far as I know, microphone usage is not cheap on mobile devices. So either these apps are doing sporadic on/off recording or we would see a strong impact on the phone charge life.