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inevitably, I'll post something responding to something I very much disagree with, to the point I won't even mention the original source because the misinfo is spreading through a game of sensationalist influencer content telephone, and then I'll get people in the replies linking to the misleading article as a source that I'm wrong.

The 404 Media post about "Active Listening" is misleading. Are there ad agencies that exist that use active listening in some cases? Yes, these are part of their portfolio and there are specific apps that have use cases where you agree to turn your mic on all the time and they collect data from it. Do they have partnerships with big tech companies? Yes. They serve many types of ads and work with major companies.

That doesn't mean that any particular app is always on selling your audio data in the background where you are never made aware the mic is on. They are monitoring you though in a myriad of ways, and it's important we actually talk about where the risk lies instead of fairly easily disprovable fear stoking pieces. It's aggregate data collection from meta data, public data, and data you agree (often through coercion) to share.