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I'm conflicted about Alexa. I keep it muted most of the time. It is also plugged into a smart outlet that switches it off every night and wakes it up every morning. I still can't shake the feeling of being listened to. Aside from the initial excitement, now all i use it for is turning on and off smart things and playing occasion music from spotify. I might just get rid of it soon.

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Toss a network sniffer in and see what traffic is going from the echo device out and when. Probably won’t see the contents in a meaningful way, but will be able to see how much and when.

Open it up. Check to see if there is a signal from the microphone to the main board when the mute button is enabled. Or trust one of the tear down videos. https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/5lc5q5/effectiv...

I've thought that it would be nice to have some actual assurance that the thing is not listening. Your post put it into my mind that you could hook it up to a Clapper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lBWjLJeKkQ and then you wouldn't need to be physically near it to turn it on, say "alexa wyd" and then turn it off.

But then, this is 2017 and batteries are light, tiny, and very powerful, so you would still want to take apart the physical device that got shipped to you to verify that it doesn't have batteries in there.

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