Copy-pasta from the article, about a related claim (Facebook spying using phone microphones) This theory has been floating around for years. From a technical p

Copy-pasta from the article, about a related claim (Facebook spying using phone microphones) This theory has been floating around for years. From a technical perspective it should be easy to disprove: * Mobile phone operating systems don’t allow apps to invisibly access the microphone. * Privacy researchers can audit communications between devices and Facebook to confirm if this is happening. * Running high quality voice recognition like this at scale is extremely expensive—I had a conversation with a friend who works on server-based machine learning at Apple a few years ago who found the entire idea laughable. The first point seems believable, but the second and third do not. Obviously a nefarious Facebook would be toggling these features off when they were being inspected, and even if they were not, they could be using sneaky exfiltration techniques. With the rise of app attestation, they would be able to do so in a way that would be 100% undetectable by reverse engineers. The relevant code would only be delivered to the app when it saw that it was running on an L1 trusted phone (with hardware security intact, unrooted). Additionally, they could embed some whisper-tiny on the device and force it to do its own speech recognition and hotword detection, only sending a list of "ad topics" back to their servers. I don't think Facebook is doing this, and the social reasons hold more weight with me, but I don't think it's technically impossible or easy to prove that they did not _ever_ do this.