Technology

Sure, people might not care, but that doesn't change the facts. Experts aren’t denying the legitimacy of the Panama or Paradise Papers, but they are saying that the idea of megacorporations secretly listening to your microphone and selling you products based on that is false. If they were doing that, it would be pretty easy to find out. Smartphones aren’t some mysterious black box; security engineers and hackers are constantly checking for these kinds of exploits. If corporations were actually spying on us through our phones, it would be the biggest topic at DEFCON. Believing that this could be kept secret would require assuming that all these experts are either paid off or in cahoots with the corporations, which veers into full-blown conspiracy theory territory.