I don’t know why people keep thinking that phones are listening in on every conversation just so they can advertise ‘Volvo’ at you.

• they don’t need to - we give them loads of data voluntarily based on location data, what we search for, things we buy, things we ‘like’ on social media…

• they’d be stung for huge fines of caught doing it.

• it’d take enormous storage and processing power to manage all that data.

• Just think about how many things you talk about every day that you’ve never then seen an advert for (confirmation bias)

• my Google Home can’t understand me when I’m actually talking directly at it asking it a question, so the idea it can seripticiously pick out words while listening through my pocket is implausible.

A few things are very clear: 1. a phone with a voice assistant enabled has to listen all the time and 2. in order to train the voice assistant the data sometimes needs to be sent to the cloud and listened to by humans.

What is less clear is does this data ever get used for advertising. As you stated there are a number of reasons that make this unlikely.

Simple solution: disable your voice assistant. I do this today and I do not feel like I am losing anything. That said, with the pace AI is improving I can forsee a day when I would feel like I have to enable my voice assistant or I am losing some key functionality of my expensive smart phone service.

a phone with a voice assistant enabled has to listen all the time and 2. in order to train the voice assistant the data

Yes, but this doesn’t happen online. Your voice is not constantly being sent to Amazon or Google servers for activating the voice assistant. It’s an offline feature that only reacts to the specific word. That’s also the reason why you can’t change the activation word.

That’s also the reason why you can’t change the activation word.

No, the reason why you can’t change the activation word is because each one is tied to a recognizable and highly marketable identity. Amazon does not want you to change the name of Alexa because they want you to repeat their marketing brand over and over and over again.

Funnily enough, you can change the Alexa wake word. It can be “Echo”, “Amazon”, “Computer” and for some reason “Ziggy” (someone is a big fan of Bowie or Sunday morning cartoons?)

I know you can’t change Siri, I’m not sure about Google but I assume that can’t be changed either.