nutbutter

Probably a scene from a Telugu film. Idk which one exactly.

Don't know about Google home, but google meet is definitely like this. You mute your mic from the UI, you speak, and a small popup tells you something like, "are you trying to speak, your mic is off".

Something like this also happened on Short Circuit (a channel of Linus Tech Tips) when testing Meta Glasses. Riley, the host was talking to it, and after the convo ended, he asked, "are you still listening?" And meta replied, "No".

So, yes, it is safe to assume that the microphones are always listening and probably recording. These things are spywares and do not belong in private places like homes.

Yes, please, thank you.

Basic SMB share or SFTP?

Your laptop has 500gb of storage. Start by trying to use it as a NAS. A simple SMB share or SFTP share would be good enough.

You can offload unimportant data to it save storage on your phone or other machines.

You can share this storage with your household, make it like a photos backup. But at this stage all the backups will need to be made manually. Once you get the hang of basic networking. You could consider hosting immicjy, which is like a google photos alternative with native apps for automatic backups.

As someone else suggest, jellyfin is also a good idea. Your laptop does not need to be good enough to transcode the films/shows, if they are in simple formats which your TV, phone or other clients can decode. 500gb can hold a lot of films.

Other services like hosting an email is not easy. It it not dependent on you machine only, but also on your ISP. Most ISPs in India do not allow port-forwarding.

Just learn the basics about networking, maybe about docker or podman. YouTube has tons of resources, like DBTech.

I used proton for a year, then shifted to mailbox.org and I manage my own encryption keys.

Are you logged into it? Or watching without an account?

2nd panel means you have to do it again and again for every new website you visit, or if you clear cookies regularly. Using the ublock addon, you have to enable this setting once, and it is persistent across sessions.