In the story, there was an implication that these audio snippets had been used for targeted ads. This is very clearly not true.
A separate issue is whether Apple take audio from opt-in full hey Siri sessions and sell that advertisers for targeting.
I very much doubt they do that, but even if they did that shouldn't be part of the "your phone is secretly spying on you through your microphone" conspiracy theory because of course your phone is listening to you if you just said "hey Siri" and started talking to it.
The problem is that the infrastructure to harvest all of this data clearly exists, and the only reason we shouldn't believe that it's being mishandled is whatever degree of faith we have in these companies to behave ethically, comply with legal requirements (or face a slap on the wrist), and most importantly, have developers that don't inadvertently make any mistakes. I really don't have faith in the latter point in particular.
The point is that maybe this data improperly ends up being used to serve ads, or maybe it doesn't, but in light of all the above, entertaining the idea is in no way akin to thinking that the moon is made of cheese.
EDIT: clarified "recording" to "listening".
It very clearly isn't!
Unless you mean "listening for hey Siri wake words", in which case yeah, it's doing that, but that's not the same thing as "recording".
Think about how many people would need to be in in the secret and actively lying about it: employees of phone hardware companies, and ad tech engineers, and execs at these companies, and their legal teams, and every contractor they used to help build this secret system.
All of whom passionately deny that this is happening.
If that's not a conspiracy I don't know what is.
Just because something is labeled a conspiracy theory doesn't mean it's not true (this one isn't true though). You're welcome to continue believing in it, but saying "it's not a conspiracy theory" doesn't work for me.
I don't actually believe this, mind you, but theorizing on how you'd pull something like this off, the answer is compartmentalization.
All it would take on iOS is an innocent looking bug buried somewhere deep in any number of subsystems that make it so that the red dot for recording doesn't go on as often as it should. just a totally accidental buffer overflow that makes it fall to set the recording active flag when called a certain way. The XZ thing was down to a single character, and that's one of the most watched projects in the world. A latent iOS bug that no one's looking for
Again, not saying I believe this is even happening in the first place, just that it's not technically impossible, just highly improbable.
If your organization structure allows a tiny number of people to modify your deployed products in that way, the same tricks could be used by agents of foreign powers to inject government spyware.
That's a threat that companies the size of Apple need to be very cognizant of. If I was designing build processes at a company like that I'd be much more concerned about avoiding ways for a tiny group to mess with the build, as opposed to designing in processes like that just so I could do something creepy with the ad targeting.
1. The occasional false positive response to a wake word that wasn't really a wake word, causing search queries to be run that you didn't intend.
2. This data being accidentally mishandled behind the scenes in Apple's servers in some way, such as developer error leading to the data accidentally landing in the wrong folder, being labeled with an incorrect flag in some database somewhere, or otherwise being given the wrong level of sensitivity.
3. This data being deliberately "correctly-handled" behind the scenes in Apple's servers in some way that users wouldn't like, but technically agreed to when they first used the phone.
4. This data being used for valid "QA" purposes that, for all intents and purposes, include situations that user would probably not be comfortable with, but also technically agreed to.
5. An unforeseen security vulnerability affecting any part of this process.
6. Malware on the phone interfering with any of the above.
7. Not-quite-malware that you agreed to install, doing things you're not quite happy with but technically agreed to, which is somehow in the loop of any part of this process.
Again, we can debate all day which of these are true - hopefully none of them are true. But we're talking about software development here, where these sorts of things happen on a daily basis. None of this is "they faked the moon landing" kind of stuff, and all lead to the same result from the standpoint of user experience.
Nobody ever describes that behaviour, though. They don't say "a) we had a conversation, b) our smart speaker suddenly interrupted and gave us some search results, c) I started seeing ads based on the conversation" - b) is never mentioned.
I still doubt it's actually happening, but I'm not ready to 100% rule out that sequence of events.
