I was about to agree but GP is actually not far off.

Smart TVs have been caught listening to people before. Cell phones absolutely do. Home automation is generally voice controlled, etc.

I feel bad for individuals with paranoid schizophrenia. Give it another 10 years and there really will be invisible cameras and microphones everywhere recording you!

Schizophrenic here with a long time interest in computer security. I've had many discussions with my (previous) psychiatrist about exactly this, often arguing that it's not that far fetched that there are a swarm of entities (not just three-letter-agencies) that are interested in surveilling you. Add to that that your paranoia might be more or less well-founded, say that you're doing various criminal activities, the bounderies between justifiable paranoia and illness can become _very_ hard to make out.

I remember especially us discussing three-letter-agencies' mass-surveillance and I brought up NSA's ECHELON and other things that have been semi-known/-public for decades. About two years later the Snowden leaks came about and my psychiatrist started telling me about different cases he had had where people were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and there later turned out to be real world explanations and not hallucinations and/or delusions.

I just wanted to share this anecdote. It's a shitty disease and you're absolutely on point about how it already is and will become even more so in the near future.

I don't think anyone will be able to find out easily since this communication is encrypted. Who knows what the random bursts of data from some IoT device are?

I can guarantee someone built a way to enable telemetry and diagnostic data into these devices "to improve user experience". It wouldn't take much for another engineer/sociopathic PM to enable it across the board (telemetry is now opt out) or change the sampling frequency or storage location.