I can appreciate your fatigue with hearing small variations on the same discussion or debate in every thread about these devices, but to discount the utility of

I can appreciate your fatigue with hearing small variations on the same discussion or debate in every thread about these devices, but to discount the utility of the debate is a bit narrow-minded, in my opinion. The value of debate, even debate that seems redundant, on a popular forum such as HN should not be trivialized. Witness the recent correction Google made with respect to Chrome and its automatic login functionality. Google did not specifically identify where they heard or read the feedback they were responding to, but any reasonable observer suspects they read a lot of it here. When technologists grieve over the privacy risks of in-home voice "assistant" devices, even when they (as I often do) snarkily refer to them as surveillance devices, the visibility of that debate can serve many possible ends: * It communicates to the vendors of these devices that technologists are suspicious of their devices. It suggests vendors need to either do better at communicating the privacy safeguards they have already created or do better at creating privacy safeguards in the first place if they want to reduce the degree of negative reaction they receive from technologists. * It communicates to others who do not provide these devices that there is a market for more secure devices of the same flavor, such as self-hosted in-home voice assistants that do processing locally and exclusively for the benefit of the customer. Technologists may not be saying that specifically, but it's communicated as an undercurrent. * It communicates to casual readers in the thread that there are risks that they should consider before purchasing and installing one of these devices. Providing clear criticism is one of the ways high-engagement people influence low-engagement people. * It indicates that a segment of the population will not happily stand by if R&D resources are reallocated away from traditional user interfaces to voice UIs on these cloud-connected devices. It's hard to measure, but there is no doubt that as R&D resources are allocated to voice UIs, some amount of investment is moved away from building UIs that use traditional touch, type, and click UIs. People criticizing these devices are in a small way saying "this is not the future I want." It's a way of participating in the economy and communicating demand to suppliers. Bottom line: Even though you and I have both "been here, done that" the value is not zero.