  Much has been written about privacy in the context of conversational and
voice assistants. Yet, there have been remarkably few developments in terms of
the actual privacy offered by these devices. But how much of this is due to the
technical and design limitations of speech as an interaction modality? In this
paper, we set out to reframe the discussion on why commercial conversational
assistants do not offer meaningful privacy and transparency by demonstrating
how they \emph{could}. By instrumenting the open-source voice assistant Mycroft
to capture audit trails for data access, we demonstrate how such functionality
could be integrated into big players in the sector like Alexa and Google
Assistant. We show that this problem can be solved with existing technology and
open standards and is thus fundamentally a business decision rather than a
technical limitation.
