Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

This article reminds me of this excellent tongue-in-cheek piece of writing by Jonathan Zeller in McSweeney's:

Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/calm-down-your-phone-isn...

The article omits a real, serious source of microphone data though: your smart TV. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my TV (a Toshiba Fire TV, although I’m sure many do it) is listening to every conversation I have within earshot, even when I am not using the voice remote, and selling it to ad networks.

And of course it is also doing screen recognition (the kind of stuff OP article mentions), but that is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about microphone data picking up live conversation from people in the room.

Privacy-seeking users have physically removed microphones from phones. This should also be possible with laptops and televisions.

If Toshiba Fire TV is related to Amazon Fire TV, then it may include Alexa for voice recognition, which could be optionally disabled. In theory, Alexa is only activated after on-device recognition of the configured wake word.

Removed microphones from… phones? How do you use the phone then?