So that they could listen to YOU through the said toaster, because whatever shit you said near the toaster is obviously very important to the Chinese.
Is there a more moronic idea? If someone were to listen to you, wouldn't it be easier to say... do it through the phone?
Amazon and google think it important enough. The line between comercial utility and national security is blurry at best. Whould the chinese be interested in how many people were chatting about a paticular presidential candidate during breakfast? Whould that candidiate be interested?
And yes, some normaly everyday people do say things that are more direct\ly interesting to China. Anyone here in the military? Anyone here with family in the military? Anyone here work for a company that does work for the military? Big-net intelligence collection is a real thing.
The reason we only think about state security in the context of "geopolitics and military operations" is because that's all we hear about and that's probably all that nation-states used to be able to resource.
But with cloud + machine learning + sufficient sensors, the old assumptions about resource scarcity for security intelligence collection is flipped. It used to take a few "James Bond" agents, a few "Q" engineers, and a large support staff to work one case at a time. That scarcity calculus is completely different now. Instead of "1 civilian to every 300 police officers", new data collection feels more like "300 police officers to every 1 civilian".
The only thing that stops any sufficiently large organization from collecting dossiers on every person on Earth is "complexity versus competence".
The kitchen is a natural gathering place, and spot for conversations.
And if I thought someone was spying on me, I would check the inside of my toaster last.
I assume that organizations that spy for a living learn from their previous mistakes and the natural selection effect means that the obvious places to plant bugs are skipped.
Sure. But maybe they'd care a lot about some tiny percentage of toaster talkers. And they likely know how to find it.