Do you have a smartphone? Why would you bring that listening device (the smartphone) into your own house out of your own volition? Please explain, because I am very perplexed.
Of course - then, the next apologist will always say: "the devices only transmit when hearing the 'Wake Word'"...
Yeah, I don't think it takes an elite programmer to store/buffer audio, until the device hears the 'Wake Word', and then sends a "slightly" larger payload... (or batches several payloads)
The next level of enthusiast evangelist will then tell us that it is impossible for these devices to buffer/store that much audio data, because they have limited memory...
Yet, the same devices when used to play audio streams from the internet obviously have some sort of storage capacity to handle network glitches.
Spoken audio (which is probably recorded at standard telephone/cellphone sampling rates - after all, why train on audio that is significantly different than the audio coming from mobile phone devices) does not take up a dramatic amount of storage space.
You're right. But it doesn't mean that these home voice assistants are okay. It just means there's a much, much worse problem with smart phones people aren't willing to acknowledge. And those of us that do and act accordingly are treated as weird paranoids.