Almost everyone has been part of this conversation at some point. Someone mentions a washing machine out loud, and a couple of hours later a washing machine ad shows up on Instagram, and suddenly the whole group is convinced the phone is listening. Half the room says yes, obviously; the other half calls it coincidence. Nobody's mind changes.
The real answer sits somewhere in between, and it's actually more useful than either side of that argument.
Earbuds are listening. That much is true, and companies say so openly. But listening and recording are not the same thing, and the difference is where all the useful detail actually lives.
How the "always listening" bit actually works
A wake-word system keeps a tiny loop of audio in memory on the device itself. A couple of seconds, constantly overwritten, going nowhere. A very small model checks that loop for one specific pattern, the "hey" whatever it may be, and everything else is discarded before it exists anywhere permanently.
When the pattern matches, that's when things wake up. Recording starts properly, and depending on the product, the device either processes the command locally or sends the audio to a server, gets a response, and plays it back.
There isn't a continuous stream of everything being said heading to a data centre. The bandwidth required alone would be impractical, leave alone the storage.
Where it gets messy is false wakes.
Wake-word detection isn't precise. It can fire on TV dialogue, on a name that sounds vaguely similar, or on random noise in a crowded room. When it fires wrongly, the device does exactly what it's built to do. It starts recording and sends that audio onward. Nobody said the wake word. The system simply decided someone did.
That's the real point of leakage. Not surveillance. Accidents, happening several times a week, on a device that sits in the ear all day.
The episode that got companies into trouble
Around 2019, it came out that voice assistant recordings were being reviewed by human contractors. Actual people listening to clips and grading whether the assistant had understood the request correctly. This is standard machine learning practice; labelled data is needed to improve a model.
The problem was that some of those clips came from false wakes. That meant contractors occasionally ended up listening to fragments of private conversations. Medical discussions, arguments, moments that were never meant to be a command to anything.
The companies involved apologised and changed their defaults so review became opt-in rather than automatic. Apple went on to settle a long-running Siri lawsuit related to this, while denying any wrongdoing. Most large players have improved their practices since.
That phrase, "large players have improved," is doing a lot of work, though, because most earbuds sold in India aren't made by large players.
Voice isn't like a step count
This is worth sitting with for a moment.
If a fitness band leaks that someone walked 6,000 steps on a Tuesday, that's not ideal, but it's not particularly serious either. Voice belongs to a different category altogether. Voice is biometric data. It identifies a person the way a fingerprint does, and unlike a password, it cannot be changed after a breach.
There's more embedded in a voice recording than just the words. Recordings can carry hints about age, gender, region, emotional state, and sometimes health. The transcript itself is often the more sensitive part, since that's where queries live, and a list of queries is essentially a record of what someone was thinking about that week.
This matters more now than it did a few years ago, because earbuds are moving from devices that occasionally hear a command to devices designed to be conversed with. Platforms like boAt's Crest AI, the company's own proprietary AI layer for its next generation of earbuds and headphones, are built around exactly that idea. An always-available companion that can be asked questions, used for real-time information, translation and personalised assistance, across multiple Indian languages and dialects, without pulling out the phone. Genuinely useful, and clearly the direction the whole category is heading. But it also means the volume of voice interaction per user goes up, which makes the questions in this article more relevant, not less.
There's one detail worth noting on the positive side of that ledger. When an Indian brand builds its own AI platform rather than routing everything through a third-party assistant, the accountability sits in one place, with a company operating under Indian law. As the DPDP framework discussed below takes full effect, that's an easier entity to hold to a standard than a chain of foreign vendors nobody can quite trace. The same homework applies to Crest AI as to anything else here, but at least the address is local.
The app is usually the bigger concern
Most attention goes to the earbuds themselves, while the companion app gets overlooked, and that's backwards.
Worth checking what permissions the earbud app has actually asked for. Many request location, justified as necessary for Bluetooth scanning, which is technically true on Android. Some ask for contacts. Some ask for storage. Several bundle third-party analytics SDKs that quietly report app usage back to whoever built them.
The earbud itself is a fairly limited device with a small chip. The app, on the other hand, is a full application sitting on a phone that holds a person's entire digital life. Between the two, it's clear which one is more valuable to a data broker.
With cheaper, unbranded earbuds, this concern only grows. Often there's no clear sense of where data goes. No proper privacy policy, or one copy-pasted from a template with another company's name still visible in it. Servers sitting in jurisdictions that are never disclosed. No firmware updates, ever, meaning any security gap discovered later stays open indefinitely. That's the real risk profile of a low-cost pair bought off a marketplace, and it has little to do with anyone deliberately spying on anyone.
Where Indian law currently stands
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act was passed in 2023, and the rules under it were finally notified in November 2025, the point at which it moved from a document into something with actual machinery behind it. The Data Protection Board now exists. Rollout is phased over roughly eighteen months, with most of the heavier obligations on companies coming into effect around May 2027.
The direction is a positive one. Consent has to be specific, individuals get a right to have their data deleted, and companies are required to disclose what's being collected and why. For now, though, anyone buying earbuds is still largely relying on a company's own policy rather than an enforced legal standard. Worth being aware of.
What's actually worth doing
Not a great deal, and it takes about ten minutes, which is exactly why it's worth pointing out, since so few people get around to it.
Open the assistant settings on the phone and look for voice history. There will usually be a list of past recordings. Reading through a few is genuinely useful, and false wakes tend to stand out immediately. Fragments of conversations that clearly weren't meant as commands. These can be deleted, and auto-delete after three months can be turned on where available.
Look for the setting related to improving the product using recordings, and switch it off. It's on by default in most cases and turning it off costs nothing noticeable.
If the wake word isn't in regular use, disabling it entirely and relying on touch controls instead keeps the mic out of that listening mode altogether.
Reviewing the app's permissions and removing anything that doesn't make sense is worth the two minutes it takes. Before buying, it's also worth checking whether the company maintains a genuine privacy policy and whether it still pushes firmware updates for older models. That second point says more about how seriously a brand takes security than any marketing claim will.
And as conversational platforms like Crest AI become the norm rather than the exception, one more habit is worth adding to the list. Spend a minute in the app finding where voice interactions are stored and how they can be cleared. On a device meant to be spoken to all day, that setting should be easy to locate. Where it is, that's usually a good sign about everything else.
The honest takeaway
None of this calls for panic. The realistic risk isn't someone sitting in a room listening in. It's the more mundane stuff. Profile-building for advertising, data sitting on a server longer than necessary, or a breach years down the line at a company whose product has long been forgotten.
Mundane risks are still risks. They just respond well to mundane fixes.
Ten minutes in the settings, and a little care over which brand gets access to that data. That covers most of it.
