&gt; However, the voice recognition module wasn&#x27;t actually used unless you opted into the &quot;Ok Google&quot; hotword feature.<p>So says someone, but you don&#x27;t know what else the binary blob (which can be &quot;updated&quot; at the will of Google, without asking anything to the user) does for sure, do you? If you&#x27;re content with that explanation, you&#x27;re essentially taking their word for it with blind trust. For example, will it push a new binary and&#x2F;or suddenly start listening to you or send certain files from your computer if someone three-letter government agency tells Google to do so? Would you bet your life on it?<p>Trust in software may not be that serious for you, but there are people out there whose lives depend on it.<p>The issue here is twofold, and in terms of security, it being a binary blob is the lesser one: 1) this is a binary blob which hasn&#x27;t been vetted by the eyeballs of FOSS world 2) Google circumvents the package manager (along with package reviewers and FOSS community) and secretly and freely installs (and updates) a binary blob on your system, which is essentially a closed-source backdoor singularly controlled by a US company.<p>A program that silently pushes programs on users&#x27; systems (and silently executes them!) at the pleasure of a company never had any place in Debian or any distro with similar principles. It wouldn&#x27;t matter if they pushed the source code and compiled it on your system (in fact, some rootkits work just like that).<p>&gt; Getting back on topic, Android handles similar problems in a different way, via the permission system (esp. the improvements in Android 6.0+).<p>You&#x27;re talking about a totally different problem&#x2F;class of permissions here though (accessing network&#x2F;video&#x2F;audio&#x2F;filesystem etc vs ability to install packages as a non-root user).