Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

They cannot.

That was a stupid study. Phones know if they are being used - the phones for 3 days around ads is meaningless.

Tracking isn't all the time - that would be tough. They do record stuff when you doing certain things tho...

It's not impossible at all, actually it's rather easy if you have access to their actual online activity too.

Does anyone recall the national discussions surrounding what constituted metadata following 9/11 when ThinThread and Trailblazer were brought to public attention?

I also recall reading about members of the TIA "Total Information Awareness" program leaving to join advisory boards for rising social media platforms, Facebook most notably. These weren't tinfoil opeds in fringe outlets, but regular reporting by journalists published in trusted local newspapers.

Are there any outlets left who aren't part of consolidated media groups that can or do still track and report on movements like this? I've having trouble finding original articles that haven't been "revised for historical accuracy" or hidden behind paywalls of the few entities that remain.

Edit: For context, I was looking for the earliest articles about Google citing legal justification for scanning the contents of emails under a favorable interpretation of metadata that allowed for tokenization by an automated process (ie- the contents were not read by a human or made personally identifiable, which met the letter of the law). It follows that the same justification is not limited to any source or data type, but I couldn't recall any more recent reporting or statements from companies over the last 10-15 years, or, the "don't break Google" era.

For apps that want to send their own screens to third parties, there's no permission needed or possible. The app is drawing the content to the screen. It knows what the content is.

Television, not phone, but YouTube sure intrigued me at minimum yesterday. First, it revealed pretty clearly that even with history turned off, it will use the history of other accounts accessed from the same IP to serve recommendations anyway. Without history, it turns off the home page recommendations, but when I ran a search, it showed me completely unrelated videos from a rock climbing channel my wife had watched on another account. I have never watched any rock climbing content on this account.

The second incident was the "listening to you thing," though. Not on the phone, but on a smart television. Exterminator was there to do the quarterly spray of my house and I was showing him scars from when I fell off a skateboard trying to bomb a hill I couldn't handle late last year, talking about what happened, and not five minutes later I turn on the television, open YouTube, and the very first recommendation on my wife's account is a video of a guy falling off his longboard at 50 MPH. Not like it's some kind of secret that we both skate and I watch a lot of downhill videos on this account, but I have never once specifically searched for, watched, or even been recommended a video of a crash, until they decide to do so five minutes after I was talking about it in front of that television.