It's not that nuanced in this case. These things are literally wire-taps. You can have a voice assistant that does just about as well as Alexa/Echo/etc, without having to sacrifice your data privacy.

Are you sure about that? Every offline voice assistant I have tried does a lot worse than Alexa. You have any examples of ones that are as good?

What's your metric? And are these offline assistants smartphone apps? NLP is expensive computing, so it'd make sense for those to do poorly. And this doesn't even have to strictly be offline; You can have your data processed online in a privacy-respecting way, so long as you actually know what's going on under the hood and have control over the data.

My shill is MyCroft[0]. They're partnered with Mozilla to develop an open source NLP engine[1], so I have high hopes for it.

[0] https://mycroft.ai/

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech

It does look promising, but it also seems like it has yet to get to the point of working "just about as well as Alexa/Echo/etc." – which means it's an open question whether it will be able to.

"This behavior is clearly related to trying to provide the service that people bought."

OK I have a device that will let you do all your chores for free and for no work. Oh now I need slavery to be legal. It's ok tho - im trying to provide the service people bought.

See how a tangible example makes tech monoliths flaunting of the law sound ridiculous? Yes. You sound like a shill.

This argument makes no sense. How is this anything like slavery? And what law are they flaunting?