Whispering no longer works. Voice isolation tech has gotten extremely good at fully discerning speech even when barely voiced at all.
Try it. Set your phone down on the table. Open your phone's message app. Turn on voice dictation. Back up 1-3 feet. Speak as quietly as you can while still enunciating all vowels/consonants.

Mine correctly transcribes speech this way, even in a room with background hums from several different machines.

Personally, I would not say anything confidential within the same room as any new phone/tablet/TV.

That's literally what an employee does.
It's what it means to BE an employee.
It's the only reason to HIRE/PAY employees.

Make no mistake about the end goal here. Regardless of what shiny baubles and tasty firewater the colonisers offer you today. They will break every treaty tomorrow and wipe you from the planet.

Very interesting.

If someone asked me to make a list of animals with wings, or animals that prey on other animals, or any other quality, I would never think to include any insects on the list. To me, there is a difference between Animalia the scientific category, and animals the living things we talk about.

If someone said "I just moved out of the city to retire in a country house, so now pretty much every day I see animals outside" it would never occur to me that they might be referring to insects. Quite the contrary - if insects are considered animals for everyday speech, that sentence could never be uttered in any rational sense, because if insects are animals then there are animals everywhere. A Manhattan high-rise is filled with animals like roaches, spiders, mosquitos, bed bugs, crickets...
In fact, in my experience there are far more roaches in the big city than in the country, because in the country insects have more natural predators, fewer places to hide, and you don't have massive piles of edible waste that are inevitably created by cities.

I'm going to use that if I'm ever prosecuted for identity theft.
"Your Honor, I didn't steal anything. I only scheduled a remote degradation of their financial accounts."

Yes, scientifically speaking, mosquitos are classified within Kingdom animalia. But in everyday speech, do most people think of insects as animals? If you asked a thousand random people to list three animals they'd hate to be trapped in a room with, I expect you'd get things like crocodile, tiger, grizzly. I would not expect people to reply with wasps and roaches.

Is this something that is regional/cultural?

I had one that I used at home and traveled with for two years before I accidentally discovered that it literally cannot be turned off. Even if you press the power button on the speaker and the little power light goes out. As long as it has battery charge, it's in BT listening mode and can be activated by the manufacturer's app running on a device in range. The default device name was BOOM.

I had one (from a major manufacturer with products that are common in USA retail stores) that actually could not be turned off. I didn't realize it for two years, because I always manually pressed the button to turn it on and off. It was just a cheap, plain, passive speaker; not a wifi/smart/internet device. I had never bothered to download the manufacturer's app because I just wanted to play basic audio. But apparently, even when you manually turn it off with the button, it keeps Bluetooth in listening mode. Only reason I discovered this is because I bought a second one and downloaded their app to sync the speakers. Their app lets you turn the speaker on, regardless of whether the speaker was previously on or plugged in. Once I realized that "off" wasn't actually OFF, it made sense because there'd been a couple times when I didn't use the speaker for 2-3 weeks, and was puzzled that the battery was fully drained when I tried to turn it back on. I decided maybe I'd left it on and forgotten. Nope. Speaker literally does not allow you to turn it off. If it has any charge left, it's on. Had I known I never would've bought it - especially because it also has a built-in microphone (which I never used). Makes me wonder how "plain, passive" that always-powered-on microphone truly is.

I thought the Metaverse was the Second Life where people got vertigo because they looked down and didn't have legs?

i.e. we're not creating human knowledge/understanding engines. We're creating full-on Sociopath Simulators.
Like most politicians at the Senator/White House level, there's no core person underneath. They are tropism robots that Mimic/perform whatever behaviors get them to the currently desired outcome.

Think of the scene where Windu is about to defeat Palpatine, and Palpatine suddenly Mimics pain, suffering, fear, in order to achieve his outcome. It works.
That's the essential nature of the software we are handing our civilization over to. Trillion-dollar Palpatine cosplayers.