While there is no system for monitoring the companies, experts can reverse engineer the apps and debug the devices. Thusfar, experts who have done this have found no evidence of these types of activities. All the evidence is anecdotal. I believe if this was a widespread practice, evidence would have been uncovered by now and we would have been reported on widely.

The implication here is really scarier than if they were listening to our conversations. It means they do not need to listen to our conversations. The telemetry they already have is so good that in many cases they know what you will say with such high degrees of accuracy that people assumed that they had to be spying on their conversations.

Either way, we need to demand an end to this unprecedented mass surveillance.