I’m sure there’s a pronoun for that.
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In all seriousness it does happen quite a lot. My phone, my moms phone when she visited and a couple friends phones. Its hopefully just advertising but it does pick up keywords in conversation and link advertising to your phone. We saw it in our browsers and facebook. And because we sign our computer into our gmail account as with our phone, we see the computer getting adverts as well sometimes.
I posted this for making a joke, but I did a test recently and I have to say that it was positive. I pronounced several words related to something and then a week later I got an ad for this. It was something for which I never in my live did any google search, and it’s not the typical product that you see promoted with banners on websites. And this time I’m not kidding.
Oh it’s real. For sure
Scary shit. Just turned on the phone, talked close to the microphone about something I don’t buy, I don’t look up on google, is nothing to do with me, and a week later it appears in a banner.
Your phone is a mind reader, just thinking about anything when close to your phone sets off an enormous machinery.
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Yeah, nice way to explain all those dildo ads on your smartphone screen…
In addition to the mic shenanigans, smartphones track locations even when gps is off. I went to play basket at the Yilan sport park and didn’t have the gps on, only the regular mobile internet. After I left I got one of those messages:“How was your visit at Yilan sports park?”. It’s really annoying and there’s no real way around it. I’ve basically replaced Chrome with Brave (which is also faster), but I can do nothing to prevent mic and location bullshit that has nothing to do with the browser.
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Yeah, I’ve seen those, and maybe after taking a picture somewhere too. I know that you didn’t visit that park but a totally different place, but we can leave it here 
But in my case it was something very clear. I don’t have a dog, I never look up dog things online, and it’s already a long long while since last time I went to a pet shop, so I decided to do this test saying very close to my phone things along the lines of “I want to buy dog food”, “cheap dog food”, “pet food”, and so on. A week later I got this weird banner half in Chinese half in English about some fancy dog food. I had never seen a banner of that type of product in my life. For me that was conclusive, so I turned off some suspicious “google services” running in the background.
The speech recognition for my Android’s keyboard hasn’t been the same ever since then xD
i think you need to buy a Huawei
In fact, you can. Just turn it off in your Google account settings
On a related note, Chrome is officially becoming a machine of spying and making sure you get all the ads they want.
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I use Tor and Privoxy as a matter of course. It’s my default mode. No persistent cookies, all the rest.
Oh, and DuckDuckGo.
USA has had capacity to spy on the whole planet starting after WW2 so I’m not at all surprised! Huawei is currently the CCP’s eyes as 1984 Orwellian totalitarianism!
I believe my phone is listening to me through google and maybe other apps. It always seems to know what I want to search after I am talking about it.
Turning off my mobile/cell phone is liberation and emancipation!
I turned off some suspicious “google service” tasks, or perhaps I stop it from connecting to internet. Ever since then my keyboard dictation plugin doesn’t work well but I’m pretty sure that I did the correct thing 
Just personal opinion, but I don’t think google and facebook are using the microphone to “spy” on us. Sure they have the ability to, but I don’t think at this point they need to. They have such sophisticated algorithms with search, email, messaging, photos, and tracking what are friends are doing, what people of a certain age are doing and they know what people 24-36 or 37-49 in Taipei are doing at any given time. Meaning if you use FB and a fb friend “talks” to you about buying new luggage or travel, but you never search for it, however your friend DID search for it…you may get the Ad for luggage regardless if you searched for it or not.
Both companies have denied this fact (not listening to conversations) and i wouldn’t put it past a company to lie…lol…but I think if they did it would be much, much more evident.
What is confirmed, is many apps, gaming, ect DO use the microphone. And Do use it even if the app is closed. Most free gaming apps make money as data collectors.
Any Chrome “extentions”, mobile phone plugins will always have access to record keystrokes, ect. Data collecting is part of the business model.
I guess it is the old adage that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
That doesn’t explain why the test I did weeks ago had positive results.