I think they mean the difference between "always listening" and "manual activation" or "no voice recognition" which is pretty significant.

A fair few phones now can be set to have the virtual assistant listen for the wake-word in the same way as an Alexa / Google Home / ...

The one saving grace with phones is if they were constantly streaming recordings 24/7, you would probably notice the battery & data consumption. Much less so with wall-powered devices connected to WiFi.

All you need to do to get around those things is just beam the recordings over when the phone is plugged in, say, when people are sleeping, and simply exempt the recorded data from the metrics.

If Alexa were streaming recordings 24/7, someone would have noticed it by now. It's not that hard to inspect a device's data usage, even over WiFi.

It's easy to inspect your one, that didn't get the custom firmware loaded or bugdoor activated. To be fair the applies to mobiles as well (and probably more so since they are better targets).

OK, but this is moving the goalposts. If the CIA has put custom backdoor framework on your device then all bets are off, whether it's an Echo or a smartphone. This isn't really the situation that was being talked about on the thread.

I can't wait for my phone with hardware switches to arrive in the mail.