The insistence, in the absence of concrete evidence, that tech companies are using illicit speech recognition is a symptom of tech illiteracy in the broader pop

The insistence, in the absence of concrete evidence, that tech companies are using illicit speech recognition is a symptom of tech illiteracy in the broader population. People are basically anthropomorphizing their phones - since humans acquire most of their knowledge by listening to others talk, people irrationally assume that the machines must be operating using the same methods. They don't quite grok that there are other less anthropomorphic, less intuitive, but more sophisticated methods for apps to make inferences about you without having to listen to you talk. I saw some guy on Reddit once triumphantly declare he had proof that Google (or Facebook?) was listening to his microphone because he started receiving Spanish language ads after he began working at an office with a bunch of Spanish speakers. Come on dude, you share a wifi network with them, your GPS location overlaps with theirs 8 hours a day, and you presumably frequently send/receive emails from them. Facebook/Google doesn't need to listen to your mic to know that you have a bunch of Spanish speakers in your social network.