This. I just received my Echo Dot and first thing I did was to check my firewall logs since it is conveniently located behind my pfSense router. Believe it or not, it isn't listening at all times. However, that doesn't mean that there is no sleeper feature.
Exactly. I have no doubt that Echo is not listening to my conversations now. It's the potential to do so later that concerns me. I would love to see a technical explanation of how the Alexa wake signal works and what security, if any, is in place to prevent tampering, much like Apple's explanations of its secure enclave.
Since it's unlikely that Amazon's security is up to par with Apple's, a good middle ground would be an application that always ran and was always sniffing the Echo traffic, and would keep a log of when the Echo was sending traffic out of the network. Maybe it alerts you when it is sending traffic. Then you can compare the times it was talking to Amazon vs when you were talking to the Echo and figure out if it communicates without you.
