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It would scare you to know that OnStar can be remotely activated without the driver knowing, wouldn't it?

Or any cell phone.

This has always seemed pretty marginal to me. You might be able to turn the microphone on, but when my battery dies an hour later I'll be suspicious.

Lithium ion batteries don't get old and lose capacity. That's just the NSA backing off the sleep interval.

>Maybe if I wrote and maintained the code myself that always listened, I'd feel more comfortable with it.

Maybe? Maybe you'd be comfortable? There's a world where you wrote the code yourself and still don't trust that it's not sending data back?

You could try adding in some simple motion, like raising your hand, before the system would start listening for hot words. Maybe connect a cheap infrared sensor to GPIO and block its view so it only detects motion at or above certain height.