The is at least the second time Doctorow has made this bullshit assertion. Yes your phone is listening some or all the time (depending on how you’ve set it up. But it’s listening LOCALLY, and only listening for the trigger phrase. It’s not stored and it’s not sent anywhere, until you’re spoken that trigger phrase.
This is obvious to anyone who stops and thinks about it for half a second. If everything was sent to the remote voice interpreter, there would be no need to train your device to understand your trigger phrase. But you do, because your device is using a fairly simple pattern matching scheme, that’s only looking for a single phrase, and is not trying to interpret word meanings. And if everything said was being transmitted, your wireless bill would be off the chart.
I assume Doctorow will follow his usual pattern and refuse to retract his false statements.
