[gf000]

What kind of keywords would you imagine provide an actual, profitable advantage to an ad company? I can't imagine "computer 2", "fridge 3", "egg 4" being all that valuable compared to.. literally my whole browser history and my reaction to other ads/videos (I looked at that short for 10s vs immediately skipping builds a very nice profile). And now add i18n in the picture - even the main AI assistant products suck in anything other than English, so this fancy, advanced technology with low return of value would end up with a low target audience as well.

Also, "Siri" and the like ends up waking the main processor, which is definitely easy to prove/disprove. Just talk to your phone continuously for a long time and see if it wakes.

[thinkingemote]

Low, even very low, return of value is not no return. Therefore, given they make some return, and it has some value, that's enough for them to do it. Ads and ad data are two sides. We are often not the target for an ad, but our data provides stats about how an ad is performing. If more consumers are influenced to spend $1000 on something than not, then it's worth if for them. It's an aggregate cost benefit analysis not how effective it is at the isolated individual level.

Another thing to consider is that we should never fall into the trap of thinking we are immune from influence from advertisers. Firstly, it's basically what advertiser want; it allows more actions like this, more of our data to be sold and secondly because it's easier to influence someone if they think of a decision as their own choice, than if they think they were manipulated into it. We do not remember the ads we see but we can remember that we are all susceptible to influence.

[gf000]

Return of value is with respect to the costs of it. A lawsuit/brand value loss from illegally recording every communication you make (which we would have definite proof if it were happening, given that there our more phones than people on Earth) would far outweigh the tiny benefit (if any? I'm not convinced you would get any extra information in the general case compared to the tracking of the regular usage of your phone)

Also, I don't see the relevance of your second paragraph. The baseline is not "no ads", the baseline is "ads supported by all the tracking that Meta/Google currently does".