Some paranoid people have this idea that Google has employees spending day and night with headphones on listening to every household conversation with these Alexa devices and transcribing them for posterity. Then these employees go out for beers after work and laugh among themselves about the "private" conversations they overheard.
Which is ludicrous. Not even the federal government has anywhere close to the number of employees that could listen in on even a tiny percentage of households.
Besides, generally speaking, Google employees couldn't care less about the conversations we have at home. I know we like to flatter ourselves sometimes that we are somehow important but most of our lives are excruciatingly boring to outsiders (who themselves live excruciatingly boring lives for the most part).
Now if you mean "listening" in terms of the Google devices capturing conversations so that Google bots can parse metadata for the targeting of advertising, then you would be correct. To test my theory, go ahead and have conversations about instant hot water heaters. Shortly, you may start getting ads for Rinnai, Rheem and Bosch instant hot water heaters (among others).
Now some might find that creepy but that's how Google gets most of their revenue and that is also why most of Google's basic services (i.e. search engine; Gmail; browser, etc.) are FREE to the consumer.
In other words, if we all insisted on total privacy and no targeted advertising, then we need to be prepared to pony up some monthly payments for all these services we currently take for granted as being "free".
Actually nothing is truly free as I just pointed out.
“Now some might find that creepy but that’s how Google gets most of their revenue and that is also why most of Google’s basic services (i.e. search engine; Gmail; browser, etc.) are FREE to the consumer.”
It is beyond creepy.
Definite not free. You pay by allowing them to mine the intimate details of your life. The overlords at google believe themselves better than the rest of us. They don’t just use that information to place ads, they manipulate search suggestions, trending, search taking and results to control. They hate conservatives.
In my opinion, forced self censorship is the most evil. An always on listening device where what you say can be stored, and a company that has demonstrated that it will censor conservatives. Evil to it’s core.