Not defending it, but your smart phone is not quite as bad as Alexa. At least for the moment.
The only additional danger from an Alexa device is that you are trusting amazon as well, but the core functionality of an Alexa device to always listen for the wake word and communicate to a server if it thinks it heard the wake word locally is the same as what most smartphones have.
Source: Mine does, very useful!
That gives me enough information to guess there's people who would make apps that take the private data without asking, whether the option to turn off privacy feature blocks them all or not is the question.
Thank Google / Amazon for creating drama where none existed.
This is possibly the biggest single problem with modern surveillance/privacy culture. The idea of requiring an individual's consent to something that is potentially a risk for them is laudable, but it's also largely a symbolic gesture when some of the largest and most powerful organisations in the world are duping all of their friends into providing much the same information without their consent or even necessarily their knowledge anyway. The whole business model is fundamentally flawed, and privacy laws are a long way from catching up.
typing to an alexa device should be an option, just like having an AI chat.
Once it is activated, it starts recording and sending audio data to google.
Every such device has a false positive rate on keyphrase activations, and of course the do, there is only limited processing available in those phones (that also try to conserve power), and people tend to mumble sometimes so you have to be a little generous and balance false positives against false negatives - the latter of which people refer to as "shit don't work".
Devices in lawyers' home offices aren't any different. And if the device encounters a false positive and activates, somewhere on some server some recording of your confidential conversation may get stored. Or worse, you buy 100 copies of "The Art of the Deal" off amazon by accident.
Even worse if your client's name, or their wife's or mom's name, is Alexa... or Alexandra/Alexander, which also cause a lot of false positive activations, or so I heard from a friend of a friend with that name.
Except Amazon was caught with their hands in the cookie jar listening on 'regular' people's private conversations on more than one occasion.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513