Why am I not in the least surprised by this? Still not got one of those spy devices in the house. I bought a dumb TV (which is getting surprisingly hard to do now if you want a large screen size), although the cable box probably manages some of that on its own. The voice remote sits unused and unpowered on the shelf in favour of the old button-press one that came with the old cable box and works just as well with the new box.
Not yet paranoid enough to remove the microphone from the smartphone, although I did tick some option to tell it not to allow Google Play to access the microphone (about which it complains regularly, threatening loss of functionality even though I've not noticed anything I want failing to work).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
