Most photos have a timestamp and geotag. Knowing whether you're in a vehicle, at a concert or sporting event, or really doing just about anything can be gathered from that information as well as whatever the photos is of. One second of audio isn't giving much (additional) useful data.
All of those individual seconds don't add up to a sum greater than their parts. There are trillions (quadrillions?) of seconds of reality that those same cameras/microphones didn't capture. Capturing a single second of each of a billion people's lives isn't really all that useful, especially for advertisers.
I’m willing to bet that an AI could learn a lot about a person by listening to a large number of short audio clips, together with the photos themselves.
One second isn't even long enough to hear the full pronunciation of all of most English words. Let's say people take ten photos per day. Let's generously say that captures ten random spoken words. Ten random words per day is hardly enough for a _human_ to learn anything about a person, let alone AI. AI cannot magically conjure data from noise.
And when you think about what people take pictures of (their parking spot, selfies, nudes, landmarks, birthday cakes, sunsets, cats), what's heard is likely not even relevant to the picture taker's life or interests. If I look at all of the photos I've taken in the last two weeks, I've got:
- Cat (2)
- Building (1)
- Stuff in my home (6)
- Selfie (4)
You can get that from me by calling and asking if Henry is there. I will answer "No, I'm sorry, but you must have the wrong number". Cheap with Twilio.
If they have access to your pictures, they have access to your videos. This matters because people don't think audio is being recorded when they take photos. As far as threat modeling goes, creating a cloned voice is something these apps could have already done.
If you accept that as true then you also have to accept that your voice is hopelessly copyable and defense against that is futile. So it’s not really important.