What this all boils down to is 1) trust and 2) the value proposition with regards to the trade-off between possible privacy violation and the value the device h

What this all boils down to is 1) trust and 2) the value proposition with regards to the trade-off between possible privacy violation and the value the device has to them personally. For me, these devices are worthless and even if their value was >0 the number would have to be enormous because of the value I assign to my privacy. The real issue here is the same issue we have with government agencies like the NSA and CIA. There is substantially little most people can do to verify the claim. For example, Clapper swore before congress that the NSA wasn't collecting data on millions of Americans. Snowden showed that was a complete lie. The NSA program would have continued without anyone being the wiser without the leaks because the only people that knew that didn't work for the NSA were delivered gag orders. So without some sort of civilian oversight committee that has real teeth, how would anyone actually ever find this information out? The same is true here with things like Echo, Home Minis, etc. The data being transmitted is encrypted so even if you are technically inclined and know how to capture it on it's way out of your home network, you'll never be able to decrypt it. So how do you really know for sure that it isn't actually transmitting anything and everything you say? The only logical answer is trust. You believe them. That's enough for most people. But to say, as the article does, that ideas like this are from the tinfoil hat crew is kind of absurd. In addition to the PRISM program, we also know that Amazon's Echo is/was being used in at least one murder case and I highly doubt a few seconds before being murdered the victim used a hotword to activate the Echo device. We also know that the NSA has a program called Tailored Access Operations which they can use to intercept online tech purchases and install spyware on them if you are a target of interest.