this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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The amount of battery used and data that your phone would be sending if it was constantly recording and sending the data to Google would be very obvious
Its more likely that Google and Co have just profiled you really well and or you searched for that specific topic before. Or that topic was an ad that you clicked on in the past or that you slowed down when scrolling to look at
Newer android version notify you in the top right when your microphone is active and you should also be able to see when the last time, down to the minute, that any app accessed the mic in settings
Android is sending a ton of data, though, even if you're not doing anything internet related. It, also, kinda reacts to "okay, google", which wouldn't really be possible if it wasn't listening.
Now, it obviously doesn't keep a continuous, lossless audio stream from the phone to some google server. But, it could be sending text parsed from audio locally, or just snippets of audio when the thing detects speech. Relatively normal stuff to collect for analytics purposes, actually.
Now, data like that could "easily" get "misplaced", of course, and end up in the ad-shoveling machine... Not necessary at Google's hands: could be any app, really. Facebook, TickTok, random free to play Candy Crush clone, etc. But if that data gets into the interwoven clusterfuck of advertisement might, it will likely end up having an effect on the ads shown to the user.
it does not upload audio clips unless you opt in during the first use of assistant
well, and text will obviously get sent if assistant activation results in a google search, pretty sure actions like setting a timer run fully locally without any feedback to google (except general anonymous analytics data which is not that "scary")