ELI5: Is the front camera from my phone reading my mind?

It's not the camera.

There have been several allegations of various companies - Facebook and Google, in particular - listening to you always. Both companies have denied the allegations, but there's some reasonably strong evidence that this is the case. Google is a particularly complicated case, because Google voice assistant is always listening for an activation code word. Theoretically, it's possible to listen for the activation code word without recording anything else, but it's also possible to...you know, record everything else.

What you need to do is go to your phone's permissions, find all the apps that can access your microphone, and take that ability away.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread