[ChicagoBoy11]

You have to be careful not to conflate two things. It is immediately obvious that Alexa "is always listening" -- after all, how could it know you are about to utter the wake word? So, in a sense, the device is listening to you at all times.

That, however, is separate from a concern that the device is streaming your data back at all times. The implementation could easily locally listen for the wake word, record your utterance, and only stream/process that part of it. It can, in a sense, listen at all times but only tell Amazon what you actually want it to tell Amazon. Which, AFAIK, is how the device works. That doesn't, of course, mean that it works flawlessly or that things are captured which you don't intend it to capture, which is a fact that has also been covered extensively by the media reporting on Alexa.