I sometimes wonder what would the great dystopian writers of the 20th century make of the fact that people would one day say "hey telescreen, show me recipes for spaghetti" after buying it for the low low price of 49.99.
If you get close enough to a CCTV camera that you can remove the panel covering the reset switch and network connection, you can just put tape over the lens.
You have every reason not to want a smart speaker that learns about your questions and prompts to give you better targeted ads.
You also have every reason not to want to buy a piece of hardware fundamentally dependent on a server-side service the company could choose to turn off at any moment leaving you with a brick.
But people seem to treat these smart speakers with the kind of suspicion that would only be appropriate if you actually thought the speaker was listening all the time to your everyday conversations to truly INVADE your privacy.
Which - maybe you would think about a random piece of junk from a disreputable company (if you ignore the monumental amount of bandwidth this would involve that would likely be infeasible).
But I feel like you can probably trust weirdly enough companies like Amazon and Facebook NOT to do this because of the colossal news story it would be.
The other reason I can imagine technologists on here to not trust smart devices is that they might be used as a weakspot to hack into your network. Again - I can see not trusting that from a random 3rd party, but Amazon knows how to create strong secure systems. If you trust Cisco or Asus or 3Com to buy a router from them, it's really no different.
Because everything you said in your own home will be stored somewhere forever, ready for dragnet batch processing, just waiting for an appropriate witch-hunt, wrongthink prosecution or whatever. It's possible to verify that a router doesn't ship your (presumably encrypted when you care) traffic somewhere for permanent storage, with these devices it's their exact job.
The microphone is always listening, waiting for the wake word. If it can discern a wake word, it can speech-to-text everything (or will be able very soon), good luck noticing your daily <10kb of compressed text in what it sends up.
And this camera is a security camera, it's designed to send up video and audio 24/7.
If we're going to enter the land of "if it's possible (or not possible today, but possible very soon)", are you concerned with your router embedding such a capability? Your phone has a microphone. Are you concerned that Google or Apple are sending 10kb of compressed text daily after recording you all day?