All the advances in toothcare seems to be around fancier electric brushes or other gadgets, but regardless we’ve never been able to move away from ‘brush for 2 minutes’. I want some fancy device I just bite down on and it zaps my whole mouth clean in 5 seconds.

How would they know that because you mentioned a thing, that it means you’re then worth targeting a ad for? “I wish i could find my fork”, or “I saw someone eating a Mars Bar” or “My mate Phil just got the new Lego Batmobile” or all sorts of conversations that just mention a product in passing. What, do they have a secret set of phrases that they’re listening out for that is linked to an intent to want to buy it?

It’s just so far-fetched that I’m baffled that people truly believe this is actually happening.

Just because technically something might be possible, doesn’t mean that there’s actually a valid reason for anyone to actually do it. What is actually in it for Google to do this? Their regular, not unethical or illegal advertising processes already work so spectacularly well that they’ve killed off entire advertising industries already.

There’s a big difference between some people at a company unlawfully accessing customer data (which is basically what this is), compared to it being a secret company policy to harvest all that data to use for their other secret business practices.

Security of those microphones is a genuine and legitimate security concern. But that’s a very different situation to the conspiracy theory that ‘Google / Alexa is listening in to everything we say so that they can put an ad in-front of us based on the name of a product that they overheard’,

Ok, heavily fined then.

Regardless, there are multiple reasons why they wouldn’t / aren’t listening in, and maybe 1 reason they would - to target you with ads? Why would they bother? Hell, my Google Home can’t even understand me when I explicitly talk to it to ask it something. Even if they could listen in to everything, they wouldn’t get any accuracy.

People just find it a fun conspiracy theory. But if you sit back and think about it for longer then 10 seconds you realise how ludicrously unlikely it is

Yeah, people who believe that Google is listening in to their conversations just to sell ads really don’t understand a) how pointless that is considering how much they already know about you from the stuff you voluntarily give them, and b) why it’s legally not even something they’d consider. If they were doing it and someone discovered proof then the company would be sued out of business. Why would they risk the damage to their rep and finances just to sell ads, when they can already sell ads accurately based on data they’ve legally acquired

And not to mention the amount of storage and processing power it would take to record everyone’s conversations, 24/7.