> When people complained that putting microphones in your home 24/7 was creepy, the response was "that's nonsense, Siri is not sending anything unless you specifically ask for it".
This seems like a distorted representation, to support your argument, of what most the complaints and responses were. The gulf between 24/7 recording and "occasionally unintentional sending" is absolutely massive and you just merge them into "see, we were right".
The complaints were (and still are) conspiracy theories that they were streaming constant recordings and constantly listening; which they aren't; almost nobody is pretending this would be okay.
I've also not seen anyone who knows what they are talking about seriously claiming that /no person/ would ever listen to the audio samples - only that there isn't somebody _listening_ to your samples e.g. in a targeted, continual sense.
In fact the only part that does sound slightly worrying is that the evaluators get location information along with audio; this would probably be enough to reverse any ID anonymisation, and if the metadata is kept - requests by law enforcement, though I would hope the contractors couldn't control/request specific samples coming into them. In any case, Alexa is potentially worse than this because I can see a history and playback old recordings on my account, which means they are kept fully associated. Apple might do this with Siri internally, I don't know.