Lies, deception!

So, I don't trust them to have actually done what I'm going to describe, (and honestly I've just accepted that even with everything off, they're still giving me ads based on stuff I've only talked about and never clicked or written anything), but:

The programs that recognize specific phrases(Ok Google), are always separate from normal voice recognition (and much much lighter in terms of processing). So, if they weren't Google, they might have left the "Ok Google" recognition on, but not process anything else that the mic receives.

They're probably still listening in though.

Not necessarily you or your case, but I'm still convinced that a lot of people just have confirmation bias (only noticing it when it happens and discounting the thousands of otherwise innocent ads). There's also subconscious ad effects, like you were only talking about it to begin with because your saw it somewhere because it's been spreading by weird of mouth from people who initially saw an ad
- Most of it is people on the same network as you searching for a thing.
- Doesn't really explain why I was receiving cat litter ads after only speaking with my husband offhand about maybe getting a cat. We didn't already have a cat, so hadn't had any reason to look up any cat care goods ever, and I had never searched for anything even remotely cat-related up to that point. But wouldn't you know it, about 45 minutes later, I was getting kitty litter ads. Very spooky.
That's the gist of how it likely works; the wake word is detected by an "always on" audio DSP, but a software mode prevents the passing of microphone data back up to the SoC. I'm actually quite familiar with Amazon Echo engineering design, and they implement the "mute" feature in a manner that takes privacy seriously: the LED indicator on that button is hardwired to only turn on when the microphone is literally powered off. Thus, an Echo device can't even manage such a cheeky response, nor can a software bug or hack enable listening while the mute button is lit.
I will say that that's exactly how the google voice api works. Of course it's all in a black box, but that's how the documentation describes it and how it functions when making a voice app
Why listen and risk even a slap on the wrist?
Recall Target:
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
Didn’t they just pass a law to make all that illegal spying legal, like that changes anything? Seems obvious if your phone is listening in a device like this will be used no matter what setting you use. I remember Amazon being caught leaving their mics on and also Facebook sending conversations to 3rd parties for transcribing. And this is just a small fraction of the shit we know about.
- That was for government spying, not private.

These threads are always full of fucking bootlickers and paid shills.
- And also full of people unironically using the term bootlickers
Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa
They don't spy on you without your permission. Comments like these devalue actual instances where companies genuinely steal and manipulate data. Take the tin foil hat off...
- Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa
  If you're high enough level at Amazon to know for sure, you're also high enough level at Amazon to almost definitely lie to people about it and other things as part of your job.
  So no, we will not be taking your word for it.
- Consent could be argued that it was given upon purchase of the Alexa unit...
personally I think its better to be afraid of real things that are happening than things made up by Facebook boomers.
why this particular issue fools even the most technical of people I'll never know.
- But Facebook can't spy on me, I repost the "I DO NOT GIVE FACEBOOK PERMISSION" spam every 3 months without fail!
- What made up by Facebook boomers, that devices can be used to listen and collect data on users?
- At some point ever you're going to realize is that the real things you need to be afraid of are largely caused by the stuff made up by Facebook boomers.

This is why we don't have such devices

You don´t have a phone?
- It doesn't run anything from google. I run lineage os.
  You could make the point that the service companies know where you ate all the time but that doesn't have anything to do with audio that I know of.
- When I turn my phone's microphone off and say "hey Google" my phone doesn't respond in the slightest. Much more comforting.

Voice assistants are money losing products. If they can do something like processing the wakewords on the device before chosing to send to a server they will. These companies are far too stingy to continuously stream audio to their servers

Back in the day when everything had to be processed server-side sure.
Now we have purpose-built hardware helping work this shit out. The devices are basically capable of handling native language resolution locally. They're no longer need to farm the data out. I still don't think they're doing this we would see it in the open source operating systems, but if they wanted to any late model cell phone would be absolutely fine parsing out your interests from your conversations. Hell, I'm sure the contents of this dictation I'm making now are being reduced and added to my social graph at Google.
I think this should be fairly easy to test yourself. Just disconnect from the WAN, say the wake word, and see if the device responds.
- He means internet, people. He means disconnect from the internet
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but home assistant is currently struggling with this and is processing everything on your local box because it can't do wakewords on the device.
- I think they're choosing to do it that way. Raspberry pi's easily have that capability to do the wake word recognition on device (i think they are also working on that). Esp's on the other hand, can only stream audio to the server and not much more. Since esp's are far cheaper than installing a raspberry in each room, they are focusing to do wake word detection on the server not on device.
Yeah what possible use could this company, whose business model relies on surveillance, have for surveiling you
Exactly. If it is practical and money can be made doing it, then continuous, ambient sound parsing will be the norm. Currently it seems like it’s not a valuable business. When it is valuable to them, they will add a checkbox somewhere in your account to disable it, and most people will not be bothered enough to look for it.
Are they though?
My experiences are much MUCH different. The amount of compute waste is through the roof, and we shrug at +$50k/m provisioning. You don't even need approvals for that, and you can leave it idle and you MIGHT get a ping from gloudgov after a few months.

Sound's like it's just not sending the data back to Daddy Google. The OK Google/Alexa bit is done on a custom chip on the device. Clearly that bit isn't being turned off, but anything after that isn't being sent anywhere.

Probably just saves support calls this way from idiots who turn it off and forget.

but anything after that isn't being sent anywhere.
You don't know that

only if phones can be like thinkpads which you can easily remove say the audio card from its motherboard.

Then how would you use it as a phone?
- I'd love a "phone" that was just a mobile internet-connected device. I very rarely use it as an actual phone, primarily just for text, email, and web browsing.
- OK boomer
  /s
- Connect a headset via 3.5mm jack or Bluetooth Snowden explains how in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucRWyGKBVzo
- You text like a normal person
- suggesting that phones should be made more like that somehow. though from another comment it seems hard to remove hidden hardwares.
  why didn't i see this in my inbox...
Doesn't matter if the spyware is hardware installed in your SOCs!
Good ol Lenovo.
- ok yeah, can you do better though

Want an honest answer?
Onboard are >=2 bits of code. At least one of those is a specific system trained to recognize a "wake word". This specific system (ostensibly) doesn't send anything to an outside party. Its entire job is to recognize one wake phrase: Alexa, Ok Google, or Siri, and then if that wake phrase is used it responds and tells the second system to listen. As you can imagine, this is a pretty easy job to get right 80% of the time. So that can be put on a chip. So then it does its job, and it's the second system that sends everything to an internet service for whatever reason.
- I didn't ask for honesty!
- I'd love to have this properly audited sometime. I'd slap like to think that we're generally protected from big companies doing unethical and unjust things to us, by law, ... but nah
  (That's not to say I don't believe this explanation; the second half of my comment was just an addendum.)
On top of what the other person said, they are always listening. Amazon has provided audio from Alexa for the police

Also, why isn't there a slide cover to physically cover the camera, and why can't I turn off the mic and camera separately? So I just use one of those black foam stickers to cover the camera.

One Plus 7 Pro had a camera that would physically dissappear when not in use.
Was my favorite phone for a while
- Still my phone and still my favourite.
My Lenovo smart display has one and I have never opened it because I don't need to make video calls with a smart display

If this is a normal Android app, the solution to this is simply to disable the Google app. pretty sure all the voice related shit and google lens and all that crap is tied to the Google app.

if its a closed source googled rom, then you have no way of knowing.

Are you actually surprised you can't unplug a microphone from the settings menu?

Do some reading, it'll do you some good.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relay
- You certainly could wire that up and I was aware of that when I made my comment but if you think any of your electronics, especially the big corp home devices like the Google home or Amazon Alexa, are wired like that then you're out of your mind.
How dense are you, on a scale from lead to osmium?
- Lol. That was great
- You're the one that thinks an integrated microphone would just 'turn off' because you tapped on a touchscreen so maybe cool it with the schoolyard insults you tossed some elemental chemistry into to make yourself sound smarter.