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I'm pretty sure even the mics are listening to what we say since for years it's been happening that when I discuss something with my girlfriend ads about it start to show up. We don't even use WhatsApp, didn't search about the said company on Google or Facebook, nothing. We just discuss something about it with our phones on our side and suddently ads start showing up.

The fact they are spying on WhatsApp messages isn't really surprising.

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There has been a couple of studies on the topic that observed network traffic and never were able to found anything. So despite the persistence of the rumors, so far this remains a conspiracy theory.

Speech to text isn't difficult to do and within the the capabilities of Meta. I even wrote a basic proof of concept on what it might look like: https://github.com/smuzani/soundrecorder

It's not too hard to transcribe text into a few kb, or summarize them further on the client, and then upload that together with the rest of the data.

I'd be very interested in seeing those studies and whether they match up.

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