Do you expect to altogether prevent people from bringing computing devices into your home? If you are not a state target, then that is just silly. Focus your malcontent on the real bad actors, not their victims.
This is not true, voice-activated Siri is a setting as well and turned off on my iPhone.
In this case, as you already know despite wanting to twist its meaning, "State target" refers to someone whom the state is specifically, actively expending resources in order to target. Target being the key word. Being part of a giant nation-wide dragnet doesn't make you a target.
Also, you can turn off OK google in Android, although they don't make it as easy as they should.
I see variations of that argument very often. Its essence goes like this:
A: This is a proven threat.
B: But so could be this and that.
A: Right, could be.
B: But we can't get rid of them all, so let's just do nothing.
Here person B somehow convinced themselves that doing anything in that regard to be futile because they can't solve this class of problems once and for all.
There is a distinction between possible threats on one side and an existing threat based on evidence on the other side.
Any device with the capabilities of a smartphone can be nefarious, but doesn't have to be. Any Android device certainly is.
So I'd like to tell people to turn off their Android devices, but may they keep using their open hardware and software phone, because I don't see them as the threat, but the entity that controls their Android device.
I don't use Android myself (I use https://ubports.com/ - it's great and you should try it), but several times I've had other people ask me to turn it off, and the best I can come up with is just dragging the Google search box off the home screen. But there's no feedback to suggest it's not still listening, only that shouting "OK GOOGLE" at the phone no longer does anything.
I'm using Lineage at the moment. I'd like to ditch Android entirely but I'm not sure ubports is where it needs to be yet. Unfortunately the open non-Android mobile OS's seem to die before they reach maturity. Obviously it's tough on them if they're competing with an existing app ecosystem, as they are.
Unfortunately, the trend is to stick a camera and microphone (and compute/network stack) on every consumer device sold to you, including TVs and refrigerators. Not sure what the solution is, since the vendors can make a plausible argument for the convenience provided by voice control and additional features enabled by object detection. Perhaps some combination of local (rather than cloud) inferencing, immediate deletion of data, and privacy laws that clearly assign ownership of data to the consumer and dramatically limit what telemetry data can be sent back?
I could maybe see it's usefulness for certain elderly or disabled people but I couldn't figure out why the majority of the population would ever want that.
A soldering iron?
I don't mind people using computers and their powers to ease their lives. I don't want to deny them that just because they are next to me or in my home. I just don't want them to use that power to collect and track and surveil everything at all times around them, wittingly or unwittinlgy.