Security researchers have examined Alexa and determined that it is not constantly spying on you. By network packet analysis, they can determine that it is not constantly updating Amazon, or the FBI, with what you are saying.
Alexa audio recordings appear to begin with the word 'Alexa'. But this is because the device has a continuous memory buffer of ambient audio that is continuously being written over. It does not store any of it until it hears the watch word, and only stores what is said commencing with the watch word.
However, there are privacy concerns with Alexa. It can mishear its so-called watch word, 'Alexa' (or another option that you may have set it to). It cannot perfectly discriminate this word from others that sound a little bit like it, as my examples and the eavesdropping scandal earlier this year show. In the eavesdropping scandal, there was a triple misunderstanding where after it had been mistakenly activated, it mistakenly heard an instruction to 'send message', and then presumably mistakenly heard the name of a recipient.
Also, as previously mentioned in this thread, it records a history of everything you say to it. The problems with this were made apparent in a story that appeared a week ago (I am surprised it is not mentioned in this thread). A German Amazon customer requested from the company all the data that it had on him (this is something you can do in the European Union at least, I do not know if you can do it in the US). Amongst this data it had 1700 audio clips from an Alexa device. The trouble was he had never owned an Alexa device, and the recordings were actually from someone else. So Amazon inadvertently leaked another customer's potentially very sensitive personal data.
Amazon Does The Unthinkable And Sends Alexa Recordings To The Wrong Person
This is a problem with all of the big data-gathering companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. They are sitting on mountains of people's personal data. Even if they do not inadvertently leak this data (as Google also did recently with its Google+ social network, leaking data of several hundred thousand people, prompting the company to shut the service down permanently), it is a major target for hackers. Hackers want your data, because it has monetary value. The largest collections of this data are the biggest targets. People attempt to hack these corporations around the clock. They are probably one day going to succeed, and then the private data that they have collected on you is going to become public data.
