The whole premise of the original line of thinking is that corporations are lying to you and/or they are compromised by the government or some other malicious e

The whole premise of the original line of thinking is that corporations are lying to you and/or they are compromised by the government or some other malicious entity. All bets are off once that is accepted as a possibility. Who's to say that the bandwidth used by the compromised phone will show up on your account? Furthermore why should we trust the battery percentage displayed on the phone? If the phone is lying to you about the microphone being on, maybe it is lying to you about the current battery percentage or what specifically is draining your battery. The phone also doesn't need to constantly be listening and streaming audio 24/7. Phones generally have a lot more processing power available to them than smart speakers. Maybe some of the audio processing is done on the device. Maybe the phone is only recording and waits to process and upload the data once it is charging and the battery drain is easier to hide. There are countless ways to try to mask this type of activity.