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In summary: Google, Amazon and Meta all deny that they directly access your microphone, and all three failed to actually deny purchasing voice data from third party apps that definitely do use your microphone and pair that with your ad targeting profile.
This is getting more attention because an internal slide deck from Cox Media Group was leaked. Based on the nature of leaks, it's safe to assume that Cox isn't the only organization up to this, they were just the least careful.
So yeah, they're listening to anyone who isn't incredibly careful what apps they install and what permissions they give those apps.
Exactly as we all have suspected for years, while they gaslight us promising that they definitely don't.
Notice that they're still denying it, and trust that as you will.
Someone back this up with proof. Security researchers would've noticed this. They'd've had to have hacked their way around the microphone permission systems and microphone use indicator (depending on OS) on your phone and upload that data without being caught by security analysts. That kind of bug would probably be worth a fairly decent bounty too.
The article talks about a slide in a PITCH to advertisers. But not a concrete system. Then it goes on to say advertisers bought a dataset from other sources. What dataset? From where? It doesn't say. Transcriptions from voice assistants? Maybe. But without hard evidence I don't believe random apps are just recording clandestinely in the background. But people want to believe this so writing shitty unsourced articles with click bait titles and tenuous-if-I'm-generous linking of weak facts lacking entirely in context generates lots of clicks.
They did notice. Malicious apps that use everything they can to spy on you are old news.
To your point - this isn't confirmation that any of the big players are listening directly. That would probably have been caught by security researchers, although it would be really difficult in Google's or Amazon's case, as they run proprietary software at a very low level.
The news here is two fold;
Cox got caught buying that data, and when confronted about it, Google, Amazon, and Meta all failed to deny that they also buy that data from those malicious app makers.
This is strong evidence that someone is routinely collecting that data. That's news. We've suspected for awhile that, at minimum, the malware apps do. Occam's razor says at minimum, we should now assume many malware apps are using microphone to collect speech and submit it elsewhere for analysis.
The unprovable part of this that smells much worse is: a kid in a basement writing malware does not have the computing power to turn tons of raw voice recordings into useful correlated data.
That kid needs an ally with a lot of computing power. Google, Meta, and Amazon all have a motive here and have the necessary computing power.
And all three worded their denials pretty carefully, I noticed.
But what is that based on? This paragraph?
I don't think that explicitly means they had datasets made up of clandestinely recorded conversations in the wild.
Really could describe ANY possible set of tracking data... Unless you put this quote into a clickbaitey article and strongly imply it's something sinister.
You're not wrong to give the benefit out the doubt and believe their PR person isn't lying.
But I'm not inclined to give that benefit of the doubt. I don't trust these folks farther than I can throw them. I don't, myself, need proof, to believe they would try this crap.
And this is definitely evidence.