I'm 100% sure my phone keeps listening to me in the background, I've had countless creepy experiences where internet showed me ads of stuff related to what I was talking. How can I stop this?
I use Android.

(fuck you google, facebook, whatever)

What stuff were you talking about

open the phone and cut the microphone
works 100%

Also this https://youtu.be/zBnDWSvaQ1I

Probably not

Yep, this has been happening for quite a while.
Check your app permissions in the settings, a lot of them have microphone access even though you never actually use it. You can disable permissions individually.
Also, stop using shit like google assistant and disable the hotword detection in the google settings.
Look this stuff up and go from there

@electrineer

Talking to a friend about Harvard admissions, a day later -> a video recommendation of "The unspoken reality behind the Harvard Grad.. " on YouTube.

Shifts to a new hostel, "there are so many mosquitos in here" --> mosquito-repelling items ads in my Quora feed. (yeah mosquitos are common in my country)

"Hey, his walks like a Komodo Dragon, Lol"

-> "Awesome Animal: Genome study finds roots of Komodo Dragon's Endurance" in my Google news feed.

You wanna hear more stories?

@endor I don't use google assistants, yeah gotta be careful.

@electrineer here are some SSs

Komodo Dragon :p

Btw that guy has a big ass, he kinda really walks like those :p

Mosquito shit

@gandfaad that's good, but you should still dive deep into the google settings. If you don't disable it, it will still keep listening 24/7 even if you don't use it.
A quick test is to say 'ok google' and see if it shows up or not

And well i suppose this is one of those people that said ahhhh i have nothing to hide until they get first hand experience of google listening to them.
People wonder why we open our phones just to cut of front facing camera and mic. Why we flash custom roms excluding the reasons of newer android and so on.
Even my teachers and classmates are now careful with this shit and im glad.

Happened to me as well. I was talking to my girlfriend, about her dead USB thumb drive. When she went to Amazon, she had recommendations on new USB drives.

Really weird if you ask me.

Same here, I have countless examples. The weirdest was when I told my gf that someone should invent a particular device. I thought it did not exist and that was the first time I had ever thought about something like it. The next morning I started seeing ads about it as it already exists.
Once again, this is only one example, I have many many more.
By my tests it's not the assistant, which I use often. After disabling the microphone for all apps (except telephone...) I haven't noticed it anymore. Since I don't have any FB owned app other than WhatsApp (for which I've disabled the mic), I strongly suspect that they had something to do with that.

Install AOSP and don't install any play services or apps you don't trust, voila

Go with an AOSP based ROM (I use Resurrection Remix) and install only what you actually want.
microG is a good alternative.

ya it's hard to stop. i for one don't believe for a second that android stops listening no matter how many permissions you turn off. what it probably does is listen but not act on what it's hearing so you believe you won. fuck google...