Oh, hell no. I've held off on getting an Alexa or a Google home partially for this reason. My main reason for not getting one is because I think they are actu

Oh, hell no. I've held off on getting an Alexa or a Google home partially for this reason. My main reason for not getting one is because I think they are actually pretty useless and I find it kind of annoying to have to pretend to be a robot to get them to understand me. But -- I also realize that they literally can (and clearly do) collect your audio data 24/7. In this case it was a "mistake" on the part of Google, which they quickly worked around by commenting out some code in the firmware. But all it would take is probably a few lines of code and an automatic update to turn on 24/7 audio collect for all Google Home users. My theory with Amazon's Alexa (and probably Google Home) is that they lose money on these things, because they don't actually care about making a profit on them. The whole idea is to collect as much audio data as possible to improve their machine learning models. It's a race to see who can collect the most data on their customers, and ultimately develop the best and most comprehensive speech recognition model on the market.