I don't think the sarcasm is warranted, because as technical people, we already implicitly understand how the system works.
I was listening to Reply All [0] yesterday, and one of the hosts had to explain to the other that, of course, the device has to listen to you to constantly in some fashion in order to know if you've said 'Alexa' or 'OK Google' or whatever.
It hadn't even occurred to me that people wouldn't know that.
I think the problem is not that the device is listening. The problem is that users' recording and seacrh queries are saved to the cloud, stored indefinitely and reviewed by other people. And some users might even not realise it and think that they are just talking to a robot, not to a team of Amazon's employees.
I was listening to Reply All [0] yesterday, and one of the hosts had to explain to the other that, of course, the device has to listen to you to constantly in some fashion in order to know if you've said 'Alexa' or 'OK Google' or whatever.
It hadn't even occurred to me that people wouldn't know that.
[0] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/139-the-reply-all-hotl...