I have never allowed one in my house and i never will, no smart tv either or wifi tumble drier that is smart. Lineage on my phone and no playstore or google account in sight anywhere.

They lose money on each device just to get you to have a listening device in your home. Amazon also hosts CIA servers that probably scrape the Echo sound files.

samsung were giving google home shit out like candy with new devices.

on the upside you could sell them on still wrapped in plastic unopened for more than what you got them for.

Maybe...

Sometimes I wonder about other devices in the home, ones you don't expect to be spying on you. What if the new TV I bought, that I never connect to the internet, still manages to connect to the internet somehow... maybe through a neighbor's WIFI using "special corporate networks" (either my ignorance of network tech is probably showing, or I've uncovered the truth...). Using the "special corporate networks," through any available WIFI signal it can hear, they could probably spy on you.

Maybe excluding a device from being able to connect to your router doesn't really exclude it 100%. Maybe your ISP and government can go in there and activate every single WIFI device in range through backdoors, gathering data on you.

All of these things are probably plausible. If it is plausible, it is probably actually happening right now behind our backs, and the experts haven't uncovered it yet. Or the experts uncovered it and are now dead.