I turn off voice assistant on my smartphone and don't have any google home/alexa devices either. I have a TV with no voice activation. I won't use voice activation devices.
Is it possible my phone is listening to my anyway and sending recordings to someone? It's possible. If I were smart I would never say anything that would be 'dangerous' if someone heard it with my phone in the room, although Im sure I'm not that careful, it's probably not possible.
If I found out for sure my phone was listening to me surreptitiously, rather than just knowing that it's not impossible -- I'd do something about it.
One affect of arguing "it's all the same, your phone COULD be spying on your voice conversations anyway" is, perhaps ironically, to make people care LESS about it. If it's doing it anyway (or just if I can't prove it's not?), what do I care about Google Voice doing it too? But one disincentive for companies doing it is precisely that people will be upset if they find out. (And they're gonna find out eventually).
You don't need to go live in the woods to care about it. It's good to care about it. You don't need to either "draw the line" at living in the woods without electricity, or draw no lines. We can draw lines. They can move. If your argument is that since you can't be sure that nobody's spying on you, you shouldn't care about the people you DO know are spying on you and shouldn't get upset about it -- that's not how any of this works.
Insisting on all or nothing gets you nothing (cause it turns out 'all' isn't really an option), and who wants nothing?
How do you know? Is your device _incapable_ of performing that task, or did you just click a checkbox somewhere? Because if you just politely _asked_ the OS to disable it, it doesn't really matter, does it? We are back to the matter of trusting the vendor.
> (in fact, they likely couldn't, because I don't have automatic updates turned on)
So you say. The software may or may not agree with your statement.
> the theoretical ability of MegaCorp to spy on me as opposed to actual known spying.
There's no "actual known spying". Spying implies intent, none has been demonstrated so far.
Where your argument falls apart (yeap, I can use that line too) is this: you are interacting with other people also carrying powerful listening devices of their own. They may or may not have disabled a "ok google" functionality, and they may or may not have disabled updates. Again, where do you draw the line? Do you ask everyone to leave their devices behind before interacting with them?