You know its a really easy to prove against, right?
Why would I need to prove it? You didn't read any of the articles I linked to did you? The fact that they have the ability to do this is not even a question. The government admitted that it was able to do this all the way back in 2006.
Just have some basic radio spectrograph to detect any signals coming from a turned off phone.
The claim isn't that the FBI/NSA/CIA/ICE whoever is doing this constantly to everybody, it's that they have the capability to do this to anybody, which again isn't even a question. I'm not really worried about being spied on personally (yet) and even if I were I'd just leave my phone at home or put it in a Faraday bag, I'm not going to carry around a 'basic radio spectrograph' and whip it out every time I want to have a private conversation.
In reality, the correlation is phones continue to get thinner
Lol, that's like saying I lost weight because I bought smaller pants. Yeah, designers are able to make phones thinner when they are able to design around non-replaceable batteries. Was anyone asking for thinner phones? They had the ability to make thinner phones by disallowing replaceable batteries for a decade and did not.
Were consumers demanding that phone manufactures make phones worse by removing useful features like replaceable batteries or headphone jacks- or was these anti-features foisted upon us?
If it had been just some manufactures that switched, or if those manufacturers that did switch had offered the option of different models, some with replaceable batteries and some without, and then consumers chose the worse phones- I might not be as convinced.
As it is now with 99.9% of all phones you can buy not even giving you the option, I'm not buying it.
It's not like this is some crazy off the wall theory. I'm not saying the Earth is flat or we didn't land on the moon. We know that the government is using our cell phones to track us, we know they have the capabilities to do so. The only question is did governments (I guarantee it's not just the U.S) make deals with/ask/or put pressure on manufactures to incentivize the switch. That's not really far fetched at all.