For people thinking about opening up their remotes and removing the microphone. You're free to do so as you please, but also note there has been zero evidence of any remotes doing any sort of recording unless the button is pressed.

Now this isn't to say the recording isn't forwarded to the mother ship once you do press that button, but the main concern has been the mic inside the TV. The remote has pretty limited batteries, if it were to record all the time it would run flat in a matter of hours. So if your remote does a year or so on the batteries, it's not recording anything unless you press the button to do so.