I cannot believe that "recording conversations and selling the data to advertisers" is something that actually happened.

Btw, I own the Brooklyn bridge, would you like to see it? It's for sale!

Of course it happened! How do you think Siri looks stuff up on the web? There has to be some sort of identifier that gets sent off, otherwise how else would that work? If that indentifier is sent to, say, a search engine, and that search engine is paying for that traffic, Apple is now taking ad money for Siri searches.