They’re bad folks, everybody knows it, everybody says it. But they’re simultaneously better and worse than you think, because apparently nobody actually knows how these products actually work. (I’m mostly going to be discussing google home, because that’s what I’m familiar with; I assume echos use similar technology, but I can’t speak for them).
So to get started, no, your smart speaker isn’t always listening. At a hardware level, there’s two boards and a tiny bit of cache. Your speaker is constantly listening for the trigger words, and processing about 2 seconds of audio stored on the cache at a time. However, this is all done at a local level on the first board. Only once it recognizes the trigger words does it establish a connection to the cloud, and use that to process your request. Once your request is complete, it goes back into standby mode. You can look at the packets coming out of the device, and see that it only connects to the internet when it needs to. The onboard cache is small, and constantly being overwritten, so there’s literally no way for it to constantly be monitoring you, by design.
However, what IS nefarious is the amount of permissions you have to give google in regards to the data it does capture. Of course, they use the captured audio for expected things like training their voice recognition AI, but you also give them permission to store all that data indefinitely, with metadata tracing it back to you, AND it’s not off limits to engineers.
That’s right, there’s the possibility, however small, that real people will be listening whenever you ask google to play your erotic jazz playlist. Once that audio is on the cloud, you basically don’t own it anymore, and google can do whatever they want with it.
So should you be worried? If you want to be, I guess. I resigned to the fact that I lost all my digital privacy before I was even born, and will happily tell google to turn off my lights while laying in bed like a fat sack of shit, but it comes down to what you’re comfortable with. Either way, I just want people to actually understand what they are and how they work, because there is a lot to criticize, so it pays to be criticizing the right things.
For me the biggest downside of a smart home ( not the voice activated music playlist) is having all of your local control activities being sent to the cloud.
Like a smart light switch. ALL smart switches should be LAN only as an option. They aren't. That means that if the internet goes down, you can't turn your lights off or on. That means that if the company goes under or decides to stop supporting the product you now have useless hardware.
Look at insignia
Hey insignia makes good stuff.
Two years ago or so they shut down their insignia connect cloud services, bricking their connected products, and refusing to provide open access to the platform or additional support. Their switches and outlets were completely bricked.
RIP. I just have some headphones, an Ethernet-to-USB connector, and a Bluetooth dongle from them.
You can still do it at the switch itself. But then it's just an expensive dumb switch.
Some switches can be controlled by something like Home Assistant from a local device. For example my Lutron Caseta dimmer switch is supported, classified as "Local Push" which means it'll work locally without an internet connection.
Home Assistant has support for a pretty large number of devices, so it's usually not too hard to find a device you know will work without an internet connection. Assuming you are able to setup and maintain the local server anyway.