I have no doubt that every tech company is secretly and illegally surveilling. If data is the name of today’s game, then tech co’s have every incentive to do so and to lie about it, particularly if there is essentially no punishment for doing so.
Everyone knows Instagram is listening. I don’t care what they say. The alternative is a mass scale hallucination that is highly improbable.
What's horrible about this strategy is that it's all the people underneath that bear the weight of these execs' horrible decisions and actions. And for this reason, we should be able to sue these executives, regardless of if they leave the company, for their illegal decisions and actions.
After all, if individual contributors and lower level managers push back against leadership, they get fired. Which is unlawful, however you have to wait years for lawsuits like this one with FTC vs. Ring, and in the course of waiting your statute of limitations on retaliatory firing expires. So yea, I'm totally for suing executives.
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/01/amazon-ring-ceo-steps-down-f...
[2]https://www.businessinsider.com/ring-ceo-security-practices-...
Alexa listening was also a conspiracy theory until it was discovered it did just that and Amazon claimed it was a “rare occurrence.”
The incentives speak for themselves.
If Instagram was using private apis that would allow to hear your mic (and I don’t even think they exist), what’s the incentive for apple to cover it up? They have been attacking Facebook/Meta relentlessly when it comes to privacy.
It’s just not a thing. Burden of proof would be on your side to show how this can be done.