They have a lot of ways they could’ve built trust without a full negative burden: which of them, if any, are they doing?
Open sourcing of their watch word and recording features specifically, so people can self-verify it does what it says and that it’s not doing sketchy things?
Hardware lights such that any record functionality past the watch words is visible and verifiable by the end user and it can’t record when not lit?
Local streaming and auditable downloads of the last N hours of input as heard by amazon after watchwords, so you can check for misrecordings and also compare “intended usage” times to observed times, such that you can see that you and Amazon get the same stuff?
If you really wanna go all out, putting in their TOS protections like explicit no-train permissions on passing utterances without intent, or adding an SLA into their subscription to refund subscription and legal costs and to provide explicit legal cause of action, if they were recording when they said they weren’t?
If you explicitly want to promote trust, there are actually a ton of ways to do it, one of them isn’t “remove even more of your existing privacy guardrails”.
On the first two, if you already think they're blatantly lying about functionality, why would you think the software in the device is the same as the source you got, or that it can't record with the light off?
It's not at all unreasonable for consumers to demand vendors--especially those with as much market power as Amazon--to take steps to foster trust that, though they may not rise to the level of "proving a negative," still go some ways towards assuring us they are not violating our privacy.
The fact that they don't take any of those steps (and the fact that we are in a thread about they're disabling this privacy feature in the first place!) goes to show that consumers have every right to be skeptical and indeed to refuse to bring these products into our lives.
I think it's inane to complain that consumers are placing an impossibly high standard on Amazon when Amazon themselves choose not to meet even the lowest of standards.
It's their product and their code, there is no reasonable way I can responsible for knowing what it does as opposed to Amazon, who is in complete control of the device and system. I can't even believe I have to explain this.
At the very least, they can provide a full log of all interactions and recording in an audit log. Have that verified with researchers conducting their own analysis on dial home activity and I think we'll be significantly closer to a good answer here about generalized mass capture of customer sensitive data. This still wouldn't be enough if you're worried about targetted spying, because we can't know when bad actors flip your device into spy aggressively mode unless you're auditing the device while targetted).
Okay..but then why should I trust that Alexa isn't listening? That's clearly a pretty valuable thing for Amazon to provide to their customers. Is it impossible? If it is..then yeah people should just light these things on fire or have a hard switch on them at least.
What's a satisfactory burden of proof for Amazon to meet here? There's only so much you can do to prove that something is NOT happening.