^ actually, IMHO the fact that you assume that "The idea that Facebook is doing this is just ridiculous." is what is ridiculous.

Some companies do "highly illegal" things all of the time. It all comes down to the fact that whoever is in charge:

1) doesn't hold to a moral system that restrains them from doing said illegal things (or at least doesn't hold to one consistently)

and

2) thinks they can do said illegal things without getting caught, or if they are caught, thinks they'll be able to recover reasonably well from any punishment (if there is any) that is handed down.

Personally, I do not know whether Facebook is recording/transmitting data like this, but I guess if I found out they were, I would not be surprised -- given the things the company has done in the past, and the things their leadership has said and done in the past.

I'm reminded of this: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

Surely no large organaization has ever been found to be doing illegal or unwelcome things.

Quite sure that listening to the conversations of billions of people is on a different scale than what you typically see.

I suppose you don’t see things of this scale often but I would argue that big things like this are happening all the time. I was watching recently some interviews from 2005 about the justification for the US invading Iraq in 2003, and the disparity between what the public was told about WMDs and what the security community believed was maybe on a similar scale (depending on how you view privacy and war). And then the people who made decisions that led to the 2008 financial collapse were doing things that hurt people on what you may consider a similar scale, depending on how you view robbing people of their wealth versus robbing them of their privacy.

Facebook invading our privacy by recording persons of interest or the people en masse would be horrible and in many ways unprecedented, but it wouldn’t be beyond the levels of abuse we have seen from powerful people in the past. I can easily imagine that the app supports hot mic capabilities and that they do turn it on sometimes at least at the request of law enforcement. And then the question is... when else would they turn it on? And would that program ever grow? Would they ever fork the program so each team involved thinks there working on a small project? This is all speculation but I can imagine a situation where it starts small and then grows until it seems like an insane program but everyone involved is accustomed to it.

Most of the analysis done about this controversy boils down to Facebook not listening because they can buy it otherwise obtain data that is more effective.

When you read their responses to this controversy, pay more attention to what they don’t say. Whomever aggregates your viewing habits by listening to audio from your TV may be listening, for example, Facebook just Hoovers up the data.

What if they just analyze the audio locally for keywords, and then transmit that?

Leaked internally... to Facebook employees...