The concern is real but the local solution is not ready. The author does not seem to think about that from the perspective of an "average consumer". I have been running my personal AI assistant on a consumer-grade computer, for almost an year now. It can do only one in thousand of the tasks that cloud models can do and that too at a much slow pace. Local ai assistant on consumer grade hardware is at least a few year away, and "always-on" is much further than that IMO.