I'd be very interested in how that would play out in a court. My gut instinct would be that there is a distinction between consenting to send voice data to a named company and conversations being deemed public. Of course, my profession is not in the legal domain.

No. You're just making things up. Law enforcement must have a valid and legal warrant to access Google voice logs.

I'm not talking about voice logs or anything else recorded by Google Home itself. Once people expect that their conversation can be recoded by a 3rd party, they no longer have the protections against other recordings being made.

> Law enforcement must have a valid and legal warrant

Kyllo v United States established a bright line test that the need for a warrant specifically depends on if the technology used is commonly available to and used by the general public.

Except that's not how any of these devices work. Nobody has any expectation that their words are being recorded until such time as they say "Okay google" or "Alexa".

This is about expectations. not technical features. If you walk into any random home, can you expect that your conversation is private? Today, that's already hard to answer because you first have to know if there are any Google, Amazon, Apple, or other devices that might start transmitting your conversation to a 3rd party. Do you know every possible wake word used by every devices with this kind of feature?

At some point it is impossible to know the list of possible words you cannot speak and the public will simply start assuming that they may be recorded anyway. When that perception changes, so will legal doctrines.

Not really, because every one of them gives an audiovisual prompt that speech is now being recorded. Nobody mutes those prompts because it makes the devices harder to use.

You can own every single smarthome device in existence today and quite rightly assume that you are not being passively recorded. These concerns amount to overblown FUD.