My computer does not have a mic. My TV does not have voice activation. I do not have Alexa or any other monitoring device. The only device I cannot control is my cell phone. I cannot turn the mic off, because it is a phone. I need to be able to speak to it.
Nothing to hide. Not a secret agent or anything like that. Just the principle of the thing. I resent being spied on.
YEP.
My smart TVs are now stupid - accomplished by refusing them access to the network (which was weirdly hard to do). They ARE internet connected, but through computers tied to them, rather than through their own interface... Which they cannot use.
I do have a couple machines set up with mike and cam - videophone is almost as important to me as a landline. BUT, both the vid and mic have been disabled by a simple switch - until I want to use them, they are stone dead. IF you intend to use vidphone, try to find a cam and vid that has a physical on/off switch.
Cortana might be useful to me at my desk and bench... If she wasn't such a b1tch, and could actually do anything useful.. Like being able to verbally access my machines and instruct actual actions to be performed with those computers... But oddly enough, all she can really do for me at the desk is appointments and timers, which I do not need replicated, as all that is already done by Google in my smart phone. It might be more useful if the two would actually work together - But they don't, so all that lives on my phone.
And yeah, finally, that damnable smartphone. About a year and a few months ago, I did not own anything but a flip phone which mostly stayed off - Even as a computer tech, on my route or away from my house, I was completely divorced from the phone world.
The main thing that got me finally was messaging - all of the avenues I had used previously from my desktop to access cellular messaging became defunct over time, till finally the obvious thing I had to do was get the damn phone and get it over with...
And once I got the phone, it quickly became ubiquitous - It is, theoretically speaking, so very efficient at what it DOES do, that very quickly, ALL of my PIM moved over into Google's system. And like you, I am absolutely worthless tapping at the dang thing. The tiny little screen, my super-sized accursed thumbs, and my getting elderly eyes, anything other than verbal instruction would render all that juicy usefulness moot.
So the phone must be on, voice activation must be on, and it is on me, quite literally, almost 24 hours a day. The bloody thing wakes me up in the morning, and quite likely, my first words any given morning are, "Good morning, Google" - which anyone who uses Droid will know, activates a routine in which the Google Assistant performs a set of morning functions... Rattling off the weather, news, appointments and reminders having to do with today.
The point being that that phone is always on, and always on me, and always listening for my voice, rendering every other precaution toward privacy completely moot. Nearly all my appointments, tasks, reminders, mail, contacts, messaging, phone conversations, routing and movements, local haunts, waking and sleeping times, social preferences... Everything having to do with !ME!, evil Google knows it all.
At this point, to pursue privacy is an old saw about horses and barn doors.
