Your phone,laptop and probably anything "smart" is always listening. Speech-To-Text programs take less than 1Mb of space and dont consume any noticeable power. Like Windows operating system periodicly uploads all your telemetry to Windows corporation and it has been like this since Win95.It is all spyware these days."Personalised Ad's" have been around quite a while.
Like i went unshaven for some days and started getting electric razor ads.Clearly A.I noticed the difference in my facial scan or something when it managed to see my face ...
I think in china it is open knowledge that CCP is constantly using peoples cam and mic to spy on them to keep them in order. We largely choose to ignore it that we are surrounded by spyware because the data is mostly used to sell us crap and mold our minds in certain direction.
Before 9/11 the police,FBI etc would have needed courts permission to spy on someone.After 9/11 whole lot of laws got removed and added that made spying on people more relaxed. Then the fake "Anonymous" came around or well,the real hackers got arrested and were replaced with FBI who hacked all kinds of corporations and started "Occupy Wall Street" etc which helped them again to change,add and remove all kinds of laws.
Whats the situation now,i have no effin clue lol.Seems every App can spy on you these days ,which they probably do.
Some OK documentaries on these subjects >
First one got some annoying hardcoded subs,didnt find any other version so this one will have to do lol.
"The Hacker Wars takes you to the front lines of the high-stakes battle over the fate of the Internet, freedom and privacy. The Hacker Wars tells the tales of the anarchic troll provocateur Andrew “weev” Aurenheimer, prodigy hacker hero Jeremy Hammond, and incendiary watchdog journalist Barrett Brown — three larger than life characters whose separate quests to expose the secrets of empire hurled them into a fateful collision course with shadowy corporations, the FBI, and ultimate betrayal by one of their own. "