like i said, are you confident it’s not storing or transmitting anything ?
You realize it’s trivial to isolate and monitor traffic for a device on your network, right? Like this isn’t magic, we have the tools to check whether or not it’s physically possible for these devices to be exfiltrating 24h of audio a day based on the bandwidth they consume, and the variability in the transmitted data. There are free, fully sufficient tools to do this at literally every level of your home network, if these devices were actually recording all the time people would be noticing it and reporting on it.
they can encrypt the data and bundle it with other requests. regardless, is it really easier to 24/7 monitor your web traffic than to just use a computer/phone instead of a voice assistant ?
Encrypted doesn’t mean magically violating the laws of physics, data uses bandwidth. There’s no reason for these devices to be using the amount of bandwidth it would take to make what you’re implying even close to feasible.