Metadata about someone's sexual activity is super-valuable to advertisers. Categories of services and products are too many to list here, but they include proph

Metadata about someone's sexual activity is super-valuable to advertisers. Categories of services and products are too many to list here, but they include prophylactics, ED medications, STI medications and treatments, sex toys, pregnancy and maternity products such as pillows, stretch mark cream, pregnancy tests, and ovulation tests, private investigators, couples therapists, divorce lawyers, etc., etc. As part of my job I interview a lot of candidates from FAANG companies. That's included several who have worked on Google Home and Amazon Alexa. I've learned that on those teams someone's always trying to "innovate" with what they can do with an "always-listening" microphone. Lots of ideas go over the line of creepiness/invasiveness, but then the product management tries to come up with ways to make it "okay" again. "Well it's for their own good. What if one of these noises sounds like someone's in distress? Wouldn't it be super-helpful if we could save someone's life by calling 911 for them?" At the very least some of these features have included trying to categorize types of noises and collect telemetry on them. When they happened, how long they happened for, and so forth. With an always-on microphone, there's no harm in just collecting metadata on when and how often noises that may or may not be related to sexual activity happen, right? Any incidental information about identified voiceprints or locations that phones report won't be correlated by any human being, of course, but don't be surprised when someone starts getting ads for private investigators and divorce lawyers. Speaking of divorce lawyers, I can think of some metadata for which they'd probably be thinking about a subpoena or two.