Majority of people believe their devices spy on them to serve up ads

People are right though.

"Your Phone Is Listening—Literally Listening—to Your TV"

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/your-...

"Here’s the Pitch Deck for ‘Active Listening’ Ad Targeting"

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...

Even if things are not directly "listening" and then directly serving ads (and I don't even think it's a crackpot theory, we KNOW companies would LOVE to do this), then we can surmise that at least the following happens:

- Ad networks have figured out who my closest circle is and has location tracking non-stop.

- I talk to my friends about something "which is taller, space needle or empire state building?"

- Even just one of them searches this. The ad network ties their search to me and ties "empire state -> NY -> NY trips" to me

- I get ads for trips to New York

phones listen to conversations. I can't believe there are people trying to deny that. It's as obvious as the sky is blue. It's a running gag at this point

I noticed that in some of those situations people forget that they also googled the topic they just discussed. So e.g. two friends were having a conversation about camping and googled specific camping items or locations. Then (seemingly suspiciously) relevant ads show up in places they would not expect. This is indeed happening very often as search/ads companies harvest enormous amounts of data and feed it into targeting almost immediately. And since there are only a few big ads networks, these interest-based ads then show up everywhere.

A pet conspiracy theory I've had for a while now is that my Fire TV analyzes my earbud's bluetooth signal strength readings to build a rough approximation of my environment and movement, and preferentially runs ad breaks whenever I move away from the TV into the bathroom, when it knows my hands are occupied and I'm no longer near the remote to skip the ads. It seems to happen entirely too often to be coincidence.

iOS does voice recognition on audio without the red bar for microphone being on, so the active app has access to the text of what's being spoken around it

Of course nobody believes them. Companies have explicitly pushed for the current state of affairs where legal entities can only be held to legally binding statements; everything else is fair game.

If that is the standard you want, then any statement that is not legally binding is, on its face, deceptive bullshit. If you want to quibble that, "technically speaking your honor, there exists a contrived interpretation in the worst-of-all universes where what I said is not technically false", then any statement that does not precisely encompass the stated behavior is still deceptive bullshit.

If they want to be believed, then they need to make irrevocable, legally binding statements that expressly and broadly cover the common sense interpretation with strict liability, no-fault, liquidated damages clauses for failure to keep them honest. Anything less is legally not worth the paper it is written on.

They definitely do.