Can anyone tell this meme is true or false? I don't have Gspy so I cannot test this
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Don't know about Google home, but google meet is definitely like this. You mute your mic from the UI, you speak, and a small popup tells you something like, "are you trying to speak, your mic is off".
Something like this also happened on Short Circuit (a channel of Linus Tech Tips) when testing Meta Glasses. Riley, the host was talking to it, and after the convo ended, he asked, "are you still listening?" And meta replied, "No".
So, yes, it is safe to assume that the microphones are always listening and probably recording. These things are spywares and do not belong in private places like homes.
Guys, ten or hundred of thousands security researchers have been going at this for years. Google isn't secretly listening to you.
These things work with 2 mics, and 2 different circuits. The recording mic is one, while the detection mic is another. The second mic is only capable of pattern matching.
So yeah it's on but only capable of hashing a 5 second recording and matching it to your voice (this shit works a lot like rsa keys if that's helpful) to serve as a wake word. Maybe flag a simple response.
All that's happening is the device heard a loud sound and knows it wasn't a match or what's expected.
It's far too easy to change the software that drives that. For example, in order to minimize blatant power drain the trigger mic could easily become a switch that activates the main mic only when human voices are detected (or even specific voices). With authoritarian governments on the rise — along with the more than willing corporations backing them — I don't think a bit of paranoia regarding the possibility is unwarranted.
ETA: Also there's nothing saying the hardware can't be updated for newer capabilities without anyone on the outside knowing. It'd be pretty easy to get away with once everyone gets lulled into a false sense of security regarding how they work.
If I was running a fascist government, I wouldn't enable my spyware on every phone--that would make it too easy to detect and it would mean the people I'm spying on would take measures to protect themselves.
Instead, I would leave a backdoor open so that I could activate the specific phone of a specific person, a phone unlikely to be monitored in a lab by a security geek.