This is less believable than them listening to mic 24/7.
It’s known fact, and in 2026 AI orchestrated. You’ll observe that if you’re logged into multiple google accounts and google makes you log into one again because your session expired, you ONLY have to log into one of them. They also track association and phone location and correlate it. I’m not saying they don’t listen to your phone, just that you should assume there is a record of every tech related thing you do (including other people’s devices), parts of that record are being disseminated via data brokers on an “as needed” basis and that multiple AI models are accessing that record daily in order to see if they can infer anything about you that can be used to sell you shit, improve their predictive modeling or mold your political opinion. As you have observed, degoogling yourself isn’t sufficient. Google knows where you were (gps, wifi mapping) who else was there and what their relationship to you is. A frontier model such as Gemini can guess which person in that room was accessing pirate sites and sculpt their youtube recommendations accordingly in order to increase your engagement. They don’t have to listen to you, they just have to look at your metadata, which is barely regulatorily protected, because the industry convinced the Boomers in congress that metadata is harmless.
Welcome to late stage capitalism.
Or vibecoded firmware that is sending every piece of telemetry Claude decided it needed to some hard coded local ip address and NO HUMAN has ever looked at the code or the network traffic.