> You started with a baseless claim that anyone who believes we live in a surveillance state is misguided

Oh I made no such claim whatsoever. My complete statement was this, in context of the original research the article is based on:

"There is an important message in this about security hardening, privacy, data protection, but this conspiracy theory that everything is made to spy on you is not helping..."

To translate:

It's important to raise and emphasize matters of security hardening, privacy, data protection, and there's alot to raise here.

But doing so by implying broad malicious intent on even the most trivial use-case observed on the device (like user-initiated voice-transcription, as I also elaborated as an example) is not helping to emphasize the actually important findings of that research.

Meanwhile, you started a broad strawman-argument "that anyone who believes we live in a surveillance state is misguided". You need to find a opposing position to argue that, you won't find that with me...