I’m not saying it’s not possible

There is no argument from ignorance fallacy in what I said. I am not claiming these devices never send audio without you wanting because there’s no evidence to the contrary.

However, the idea that everyone’s microphones are always listening, and that’s why you saw an ad for whatever after talking to your friend, yet not a single person has observed a device uploading this kind of data, nor has anyone ever leaked any kind of information on this supposed system, is extremely unlikely to be true in my opinion.

They don’t need microphones to do this. Regular tracking is plenty to do a good job at suggesting you a highly relevant ad, and frequency illusion does the rest. You’re not noticing the thousand times you see ads that are irrelevant to whatever you were talking about, but the one time you do notice really sticks out.

Frankly there are plenty of more concerning ways of violating our privacy that are out in the open that I believe are a much higher priority than mics always recording, of which there is no evidence for.

Sure, but that’s not the commonly repeated conspiracy, even by non technical normal people, that everyone’s mics are listening all the time and they’re being used to serve you ads or whatever. The scale of this is not at all comparable to what I’m talking about. Yeah, I’m sure sometimes devices are inactivated inadvertently, those responses are uploaded, and people have listened to those recordings when they didn’t have permission. That is a far cry from all devices listening nearly all the time, using some surreptitious method to upload the data, and what was being recorded being used for some nefarious purpose.

Again, I’m not excusing these devices for being a privacy nightmare, but I just think it’s extremely implausible that Alexa, Siri, Google, etc. are always listening and nobody has discovered a device uploading.

The real privacy nightmare is that recording your conversations is completely unnecessary to build a richly detailed profile of you and your contacts. Regular old device / browser fingerprinting and a few people in your group sharing contacts with apps is enough for that, and it’s not a top secret conspiracy.

Why has no security researcher published evidence of these devices with microphones uploading random conversations? Nobody working on the inside has ever leaked anything regarding this potentially massive breach of privacy? A perfectly secret conspiracy by everyone involved?

We know more about top secret NSA programs than we do about this proposed Alexa spy mechanism. None of the people working on this at Amazon have wanted to leak anything?

I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it seems extremely improbable to me that everyone’s microphones are listening to their conversations, they’re being uploaded somewhere to serve them better ads, and absolutely nobody has leaked anything or found any evidence.

Your vision is always a singular dot in space, unless you have amblyopia or something else causing your eyes to point in different directions. Even if you’re looking at a featureless line, your eyes are fixed on a single point in space. It’s not like one eye is looking somewhere different from the other eye. The triangle still exists.

There is no difference to stereo vision depth perception regardless of how the view points are oriented in the X and Y axis. The practical proof for this is in rangefinders; neither simple consumer stereo rangefinders nor complicated military stereo rangefinders, such as those found on battleships or antiaircraft guns, are oriented in the Y axis to gain some advantage. There’s no need. The triangle is the same regardless of X-Y orientation.

I see what you’re saying about the example of two completely featureless lines oriented exactly along the X axis in a completely featureless space, as this wouldn’t work with a coincidence rangefinder, but this is an edge case and not something you’d encounter in real life. You’d also have other cues for depth perception beyond just stereopsis.

It’s not just gamers either - I recently got a new job and all our work laptops have AMD processors, which I was pretty surprised to see.

Huh? That doesn’t make sense. Depth perception is in the Z (depth) axis. It’s neither in the X (horizontal) or Y (vertical) axis. You get the exact same stereo vision depth perception regardless of the orientation of your eyes.

Imagine a triangle with your eyes and the subject at a distance as the points. This triangle can be rotated around the long axis without changing anything. Tilting your head does nothing for visual depth perception.