Exactly. Tens of thousands of people have worked on these products. Many of them ex-employees now. Many disgruntled, even.

And we’re supposed to believe they’re all united in keeping this a secret? Nothing has been leaked, no security researchers have found anything, just a perfectly hidden conspiracy sitting in millions of homes?

I agree with the sentiment, but that seems like a vast overestimation on who would actually know what the device collects. More sophisticated things than this have been made with less. Programmers often have siloed concerns, and PMs only know what their incentives are. It's not hard to imagine less than a hundred people knowing, and what percentage of those people care about us?

Do we have some data that suggests tens of thousands of people have had an integral role in Alexa?