I am so sick of running into people who deny that there is something wrong with having an alexa speaker in their home, because allegedly all smartphones constantly do the exact same thing.

smartphones are not listening all the time, unless you have siri or google assistant enabled, and only then it is listening for the trigger words. smartphones serve you ads based on how you interact with malicious apps like facebook. they will guess the things you are probably talking about with shocking accuracy because they are mind control and surveillance appliances. the apps don't need the microphone to do this, they just need to analyze interactions.