Would it really, or is your comment the response to them already having been caught? How would we really know the difference if nobody wants to beleive it? This is exactly how things were before Snowden. Your argument begs the question, in other words.

But ya know…

I know they arnt, at least I believe they arnt listening.

But sure as hell feels like it sometimes!

Still I’m smart enough and knowledgable enough to know that combined signals used to target and my own confirmation bias can make it seem like we are being listened to.

We can sometimes talk about something and then literally see an Ad for it.

That services like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Assistant etc. exist with 24x7 listening devices shows that cost is no longer a hurdle in deploying this at scale. And note that they do not have to upload the audio files (which by the way, they can - I remember Google showcasing an audio codec - https://github.com/google/lyra - that is suitable for very low bandwidth, so neither bandwidth nor storage is a big issue today). Today's phones also have enough power to transcribe the audio on device itself (e.g. Google Live Transcribe feature now works when offline - https://9to5google.com/2022/03/10/google-live-transcribe-fea... ). Why do you think there is a sudden push now to put AI on SoCs and thus on device? It's partly because BigTech want to offload more and more processing on to your device. We are at a stage where hardware has outpaced system software development and is actually underutilised.

(And we are also at the techno-cultural cusp where the ownership of most of our devices are questionable, and moving towards a dystopian future where we will no longer be able to claim rights on these computing devices).

These days you could easily run Whisper locally on each cable box and report back whatever information advertisers will pay for. It will run a bit hot, but what do they care if they waste your electricity.