The sentence in question comes eight (8) paragraphs in, and reads: "While it’s natural to be chiefly concerned about privacy when your apartment comes with an Amazon microphone pre-installed, we should also be critical about where the data extracted from us ends up."
In context, no other word makes as much sense, and the request would make the article worse.
edit for clarification: continuous capture to the cloud
The device does continuously monitor (capture) audio, but the detection is done locally and data is only transmitted to the respective service after the keyword match.
This is reasonable as long as you trust that the device is performing as designed (and that the design doesn't include any undesired behaviors).
The privacy concern is that it'd be trivial for someone to use amazon's firmware keys to sign a new firmware and flash the device remotely that would indeed make it upload continuously. Normally that'd be far fetched, but, with Amazon's connections to intelligence agencies, it's more of a valid threat than it appears on its face.
Such a thing would be trivial to detect with proper network monitoring because an audio stream is pretty simple to trigger an alert on, but, almost nobody is doing that because typically if you're worried about something like that you're not going to buy a device like this.
> it'd be conceivable for someone to use amazon's firmware keys to sign a new firmware
However, I disagree with the word 'trivial' and the framing it implies. It would require a non-trivial amount of effort for Amazon to do this; both to keep it secret within Amazon; and to build, sign, and ship a custom firmware; and to avoid detection by changes in the device's bandwidth patterns.
This shows that at very least the "wake word" can be easily changed.
I think that anyone installing device like that without having a complete control over it is just ignorant. And this is surprising, since many tech people don't see any problems with it.