I would imagine that for the people that didn't grow up in such a country ruled by Securitate do not have the experience to make them fear being listened in. Not saying that they are wrong (they may turn out to be right), just that we are all products of our experiences.

This is such a specious argument and yet repeated ad nauseam. Please stop. For one, it doesn't make the listening and harvesting of data ok, just because it may already be happening. Also, it's just condescending. You don't think the parent or other people of reasonable intelligence and valid concern haven't thought about that? Then, it also just misses the point anyway -- no, I'm not OK with my cell phone harvesting anything and everything it can get (cadence of my walk, say). Yes, I like having access to maps on the go. These concerns aren't mutually exclusive, and most of us choose not to live like Stallman. We still live in a rich and complex ecosystem of law and precedence, highly dependent on where we are on a given day, what nationality we are, etc. None of that invalidates the quite reasonable expectation to privacy (not to mention that solutions exist such as opt-in, but cavalier people working in tech choose instead the race to the bottom of privacy and chasing cost-per-click).

It's relatively straightforward on a smartphone to monitor the battery and bandwidth consumption that active listening and device<>server communications are occurring.

Of course - then, the next apologist will always say: "the devices only transmit when hearing the 'Wake Word'"...

Yeah, I don't think it takes an elite programmer to store/buffer audio, until the device hears the 'Wake Word', and then sends a "slightly" larger payload... (or batches several payloads)

The next level of enthusiast evangelist will then tell us that it is impossible for these devices to buffer/store that much audio data, because they have limited memory...

Yet, the same devices when used to play audio streams from the internet obviously have some sort of storage capacity to handle network glitches.

Spoken audio (which is probably recorded at standard telephone/cellphone sampling rates - after all, why train on audio that is significantly different than the audio coming from mobile phone devices) does not take up a dramatic amount of storage space.

I think that may have been true in the past but I would not at all be surprised if modern smartphones can record 24/7 with negligible effect on battery life, and upload the audio while being charged.

I do have a smartphone, and I also do know that by default my phone is not actively listening on me (if it matters I do not use Siri-like services and I don't intend to). This is not the case with all these Alexa-like devices, but correct me if I am wrong.

I don't have a smartphone (never have) and I don't take my dumb nokia with me unless the battery is out.

You're right. But it doesn't mean that these home voice assistants are okay. It just means there's a much, much worse problem with smart phones people aren't willing to acknowledge. And those of us that do and act accordingly are treated as weird paranoids.