Samsung TV's have an ai assistant: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-redefines-ai-search-on-smart-tvs-with-a-smarter-bixby-voice-assistant

Samsung Ai assistant privacy policy: https://d264isyiyrfhr3.cloudfront.net/storage/tos/usa/2.1.3/1765237389944/eng/usa_eng_pp.html

Other Samsung Scandals if the above wasn't enough: https://cybernews.com/privacy/samsung-settles-lawsuit-collecting-texans-tv-data/

Here's court cases lost by Google and Apple

Also, whenever monolithic megacorporations not recording you directly, virtually everyone is still buying any data about you they can get from actual malware distributing criminals.

Microphone hijacking is real and commonplace. (Edit: Fixed link thanks to some feedback.)

The malware vendors sell what they learn about us on black markets. And in net effect, everyone is buying from them.

They "Privacy Wash" the things they learn from the illegal recordings, by passing them from one disreputable broker to another. Each broker can keep poor quality records of exactly where they got their data. Pretty soon it's just "part of your digital fingerprint" and "can't be helped".

Mark Zuckerberg puts a sticker over his laptop camera and microphone.

The manufacturers tell you.

And they even make you click the "I have read and understood this" button under the document that explicitly states that they're spying on you and selling all your data.

don't need any such "proof". the whole industry has lost any and all benefit-of-doubt privileges, for ever. they don't get an opportunity to gain a foothold in mi casa and possibly be in a position to do harm.

I don't get the idea that after all the shit they pulled someone's like "well maybe this new thing's nice".

those are immoral people with zero compunctions about doing anything that hurts you, your community, and humanity as a whole. we are in an adversarial position and you'd do well to remind yourself of that constantly.

It's still never been proven despite countless very smart people looking for this exact behaviour for well over a decade now. The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.

For instance on an android phone, it's not really possible for an app to do something that a determined enough security researcher couldn't ultimately detect if they were looking for it. When you can build your own version of the operating system and decompile the application easily, there's not really any other places to hide that won't give something away.

If you feel like your phone is acting off of a conversation you had without interacting with it, it's nearly always one of these three:

• The vast majority of people are super predictable most of the time.
• You are not accounting for other people in the conversation, who may well have just googled the thing. These companies know who you spend time with, they don't need a microphone for that.
• Baader meinhof phenomenon

Don't get me wrong, I've thought surely something fishy was going on plenty of times, but the reality is, until someone can actually prove it (which is entirely possible to do if it's happening), it's gotta just be the above. We're being tracked a crazy amount, but it's not passively by microphones in our pockets

Note: none of this applies if you're actually being specifically individually targeted (i.e. by a hostile government). All bets are off in that instance

Anecdotal, but I was on a Boy Scout trip as a chaperone where us parents were talking to each other in person about where we'd take our first break en route to the campsite. We decided on a Burger King at one of the towns along the route (it being a small town, the only one there). My phone was in my pocket at the time, powered on but black screen idle.

I got back into my car and pulled up Google Maps. As I typed in the words Burger King, it auto completed with the one we were just talking about that was half a state away in that town. It didn't pull up the closest one to me, which I would have expected it to do.

Freaked me out.

The very notion of proof implies that you can reproduce it. So I would suggest you forget what anybody here or elsewhere said. Instead, you :

• get a cheap phone (so typically Android)
• reset/format/flash it to a blank state
• make a new testing account on it
• use for random browsing, using app, etc and you log your history, namely what did you actually do AND what ads you actually see
• test for something outside of your new habits with a search query, then log and compare again, seeing the threshold to change
• repeat the last step for something said using e.g. a voice assistant, log&compare
• repeat WITHOUT explicit search, log&compare

Yes this takes a of time but that will help you make YOUR own opinion on the matter if you genuinely care.

Okay, so here is my story:

I was on holiday with my friends and we were playing a TTRPG. In the RPG our group needed charol tablets. I have never in my life googled or needed something like that.

After the session, I opened up Amazon to buy something I forget to pack and voilà: Amazon suggested me to buy charol tablets.

My smartphone must have listened in and given that data to Amazon.

No Alexa or similar products were in the vacation home.

AFAIK this is the only evidence: a claim by a marketing company that they're actually doing it. However, they have some reason to lie about this, bc it makes them sound all-knowing and powerful to their clients.

https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/

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.

Regarding TVs, WikiLeaks' Vault 7 publication in 2017 included "Weeping Angel", CIA malware for Samsung TVs which streams audio from them while they're in "fake off" mode.

https://mashable.com/article/cia-samsung-tv-hack-weeping-angel

For example there was this one time where videos from robot vacuums leaked, including people shitting. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11562599/Robot-vacuum-cleaner-took-photos-woman-toilet-images-ended-Facebook.html

Every device made to receive voice commands (Smart TVs, Amazon Echo) WILL listen to everything you say.

And if they provide a button or setting to turn that off you are relying on trusting them to comply with it (I don't think they do and even if they are found doing it they will probably pay a minuscule fine for it)

Think of something you've never mentioned or discussed before, then out of nowhere, start having a conversation with a friend about it, how much you like it and are thinking about getting it, taking lessons etc then see what happens over the next week on either your or your friend's ads (turn off ad blocker if you use one).

I recommend something completely unusual for most people like an instrument (didgeridoo or cowbell)

many tv and phone manufacturers will literally say it in their license agreement.

i have read this in many different phones and some tvs.

When I talk to somebody who has Facebook on their phone, an ad for that thing pops up in their feed. It's been obvious for years.