Cris_Citrus

Interesting, I was sometimes kinda curious how they compared in that regard!

If you wanted to expand on that I’d be curious to hear your thought and experience on how things compare, but I appreciate you sharing that take ☺️

I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t immediately register the joke. But at least from the slew of down votes I can tell I’m not alone in being a little bit dumb 😅

Neither of those sources really disagree with what I said, though I do appreciate you adding the additional context because those things are worth knowing about

Smart speaker research: Security researchers have documented potential vulnerabilities in smart speakers and voice assistants.

• Mobile security: Documented cases of spyware accessing device microphones have been reported.

• Enterprise security: Organizations have reported incidents involving unauthorized audio access.

• Application permissions: Studies have shown some applications requesting unnecessary microphone access.

None of those are really the widespread, passive, undisclosed listening for advertising data that people imagine there to be and that OP appeared to be asking about. The google and apple lawsuit is about google assistant and siri triggering unintentionally, which is a feature that discloses its always listening which I mentioned at the very beginning

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/facebook-doesnt-need-listen-through-your-microphone-serve-you-creepy-ads old article but the eff is pretty reputable

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/features/no-your-iphone-isnt-listening-to-you-heres-but-the-truth-is-even-worse/ from 2025

The only one I’m aware of is him saying “sometimes you need a dictator” when criticized by other world leaders who called him a dictator at some global politics event thing- are there others?

Aside from devices that acknowledge theyre listening all the time there actually isnt any, for undisclosed data collection via microphone specifically. Research has, to my knowledge, never found that to be the case

Researchers have generally explained that they dont need to listen to what you say with a microphone- they collect so much data about you they can accurately model what you’re likely to have any interest in, and when that happens frequently enough confirmation bias takes over.

That being said, yes, that person is having all of their data collected, by meta directly and through cookies tracking them around the web. By google and android. By ai, and other companies. By the tracking images in the emails they open. Etc. Theres lots of evidence for all of those things

And there is evidence for companies having collected data that people didnt concent to, like when google tracked location data that people opted out of sharing (there was a lawsuit) or meta recently ended up in the news for circumventing the sandboxing around the Facebook app to collect mobile web activity in a way they’re not supposed to be able to.

I barely understand what I just read but it made me happy, thanks for blessing us with your comic