As tech companies add microphones to a wide range of products, including refrigerators and motor vehicles, they also set up transcription farms where human employees listen to what people say to the devices and tweak the recognition algorithms.

From: Silicon Valley Is Listening to Your Most Intimate Moments:

For $12 an hour, she and her fellow contractors, or “data associates,” listened to snippets of random conversations and jotted down every word on their laptops. Amazon would only say the work was critical to a top-secret speech-recognition product. The clips included recordings of intimate moments inside people’s homes.

The records included pretty much secret and intimate records that the users would never wish for them to be shared, for example: "a boy expressing a desire to rape; men hitting on Alexa". #Amazon

The Australian government uses an American company which keeps a big database to search and track the movements of cell phones in Australia. The company builds its phone locations database by buying location data accumulated by various apps. I'd say it should be a crime for apps to report the phone's location. But that won't be enough to stop the snooping. (reference). This is an example of using Surveillance software providers. #Australia

CLOCK: [2023-12-29 Fri 06:37]–[2023-12-29 Fri 07:34] => 0:57

According to this article, Habib el-Adly, confused in 2014 that the Egyptian Police used to use collected information from surveillance to blackmail politicians later:

ولكن مع ذلك فإن ممارسات الرقابة على الإنترنت والاتصالات قبل ثورة يناير كانت أقل وطأة مما تلاها. على الأغلب، كان النظام قبل الثورة يستهدف معارضين وشخصيات بعينها في ممارسته لمراقبة الإنترنت والاتصالات، في امتداد ربما لسياسات مراقبة الاتصالات بشكل عام، التي اعترف بها لاحقًا وزير الداخلية الأسبق حبيب العادلي في شهادته عام 2014 أمام المحكمة في قضية اقتحام الحدود الشرقية، وأوضح كيف كانت المعلومات التي تجمعها الأجهزة الأمنية تستخدم في "التجنيد".