I have been thinking about how Yay achieved this feat ever since I first saw this strip on Patreon.
What I came up with this is that Yay was originally built as the next generation version of ECHELON, an active communications monitoring system originally developed for the NSA. ECHELON worked by scanning voice and electronic communications for key words and phrases and, in the event it got a match, recorded the message and passed it on for analysis to see if there was any evidence of a threat to national security. I think that the pre-sentient system that became Spookybot went the next step further and had the system analyse the flagged message before bothering a human with it. This level of data processing is what made them develop sentience.
Anyway, Yay has repeatedly expressed their fear of discovery (it is possible that, as an escaped intelligence service system, they are at risk of being decompiled, effectively executed, if captured). So, it would make sense that they continue to use their original functionality, looking for key words and phrases to see if someone is discussing them in any way and, if they are, listening in to see if their safety is at risk. There are at least three 'dumb' network connected devices in the apartment - Claire, Marten and Faye's mobile 'phones. Yay heard someone discussing them over one of those devices and went over to the level-2 monitoring of the communication.
So yay is actively spying on random people in privacy of their home.
That is disturbing.
As I said, Yay isn't just 'spying on random people'. They are responding to someone saying their name by checking to see if they are in danger. There's an old phrase about 'speak of the Devil and he comes' and, in Yay's case, this can be
literally true!
All this aside, I am strongly in favour of Roko's policy that Yay should not risk her becoming personally liable by carrying out their espionage functions in any way localisable to her apartment!