Please refrain from suggesting I&#x27;m some &quot;loud-mouthed&quot; internet user. You do not know me.<p>I, as well, do not know you, so I&#x27;m unable to accept a drive-by accusation that having an Echo means I&#x27;ll &quot;not ever have privacy again&quot;, a bold claim indeed. Lots of people shout out things that seem plausible, even flash a bit of confidence-inspiring bravado, and have no intention of actually helping clear the air on a topic like this.<p>I stand corrected on one thing; I do see that Echo transmits a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word. I also know, from when I was doing my own debugging&#x2F;hacking a while back, that there are requests made in cleartext to download packaged code during firmware updates, and based on the limited console hacking I did way back then (though I don&#x27;t know enough about signal processing to have gotten more than that from the test pads on the bottom), Echo appears to have two bootable partitions, and swaps between them upon a successful upgrade - pretty standard stuff, it didn&#x27;t appear that one partition was <i>hiding</i> anything, just that it had older packages.<p>My network analysis at the time was inconclusive in some respects due to some traffic being encoded&#x2F;encrypted in a way I didn&#x27;t immediately recognize -- frankly, my efforts at that time were focused on what was coming <i>back</i> to the Echo, and I will certainly investigate more of what&#x27;s going out.<p>Your commentary thus far does not suggest anything privacy destroying (they know who I am and what I&#x27;ve bought? So?) but I will be happy to share what I find if I find anything. I know of many people smarter than I who&#x27;ve intercepted and analyzed the traffic and didn&#x27;t find anything that suggests users &quot;would not ever have privacy again&quot;, so I don&#x27;t have high hopes of finding enlightenment without the assistance of someone who professes to have the answers.