Evidence or it didn't happen. It's one thing to have an idea ("Oh I know my phone could be eavesdropping on me"), another to estimate its plausibility ("But th

Evidence or it didn't happen. It's one thing to have an idea ("Oh I know my phone could be eavesdropping on me"), another to estimate its plausibility ("But that could never happen, unless—aliens!"), and yet another to find evidence ("We were able to identify on-chip circuitry that structurally amounts to a CPU-in-a-CPU", "We were able to intercept signals from the device that cannot be explained by regular usage and would appear to have been initiated by the device without user action"). That's a slippery road indeed when the manifestation of a thought in one's brain is enough to convince one of the reality of it. I have to deal with people who suffer from this, and just as an aside, it often seems to be connected to outlandish claims; in the matter discussed here, that's happening when OP writes "Microphones and cameras may sound like a stretch, unless it's a super top-secret alien technology that hasn't been publicly revealed". Not even sure "alien" here is to mean "extra-terrestrial" or just "outlandish", but at any rate I sure can make any narrative sound plausible by introducing an improbable factor. Fairy tales work that way. As for the assumption of "alien" tech that enables clandestine transmission of (useful, therefore voluminous) video data, there are mathematical boundaries here that we can use as guardrails for sanity: even not-yet-public and / or alien tech has to abide by the laws of physics and mathematics. For the narrator of a fairy tale, that is not a problem, of course: "But what if they use undetectable carrier waves? X-Waves??" OMG we're DOOMed. If the pandemic has taught me something it is that some people come with a veneer of "critical", "independent" thinking, only to then, under the pressure of lockdowns, turn out to be someone who doubts everything related to vaccines ("it's not natural", "vaccines actually cause polio") while readily believing any kind of striped BS they heard somewhere on the internet or from an acquaintance. Any kind of striped BS.