> How about a pitch deck for a company [1] claiming it can offer microphone eavesdropping based ad targeting [2]? Maybe that was still aspirational though.

What companies claim they can do when they try to sell their shit product at a ridiculous price is a very different thing from what they can do.

Amazon Shopping was also supposedly a leap forward for shopping. Turns out it was just a guy watching a camera (we were told it was all automatic with state of the art object recognition tech).

Cellerite is another incredible example of this that places like reddit and HN love to suck off. They are the be all and end all until you read their actual technical papers (which companies and police forces that purchase from them do NOT do) and their very strict limitations (which they don't hide in their manuals, they just don't include any of that in their lovely powerpoints).

I think it's still aspirational. If it was as wide spread as people think, someone would have shown a packet capture or an whistleblower would have come forward.

That said, I full agree that unless we legislate it, it will happen eventually.

I posted about that one on lobste.rs a while ago: https://lobste.rs/s/mf7guc/leak_facebook_partner_brags_about...

I'm confident it was a sales team putting together a dishonest pitch deck that deliberately took advantage of this widespread conspiracy theory.