[philsnow]

I've thought that it would be nice to have some actual assurance that the thing is not listening. Your post put it into my mind that you could hook it up to a Clapper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lBWjLJeKkQ and then you wouldn't need to be physically near it to turn it on, say "alexa wyd" and then turn it off.

But then, this is 2017 and batteries are light, tiny, and very powerful, so you would still want to take apart the physical device that got shipped to you to verify that it doesn't have batteries in there.