“The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs. That was an error on our part,” Google said in a statement.

The fact they don't even respect your intelligence enough to come fully clean should tell you all you need to know. Boycott all smart home technologies and research the endgame implications of a fully connected internet of things (IoT) and 5G. James Corbett has an excellent doc on technocracy that covers some of it.