Amazon Echo recorded conversation, sent to random person

Here a few months ago removed the Amazon Echo in the master bathroom due to random speech and it spooking wife (asking too many questions)
 
Replaced it with a touchscreen running Squeezeplayer which works just fine. 
 
Master bathroom:
 
Homeseer Touch ==> Amazon Echo ==> Squeezeplayer (1Gb eMMC).
 
The Squeeze player is very simple running Ubuntu 14.06 on 1Gb of an internal eMMC which is a bit more light than Wintel running on SSD.  Really similar simple boxes.

Call me paranoid but I not only don't own Echo and I have also disabled the microphone on my laptop.
Check this out
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBnDWSvaQ1I
 
Mike.

European countries seem to be fighting back against companies invading your privacy
 
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44248448?ICID=ref_fark
 
Mike.

Relating to laptop floaters here just fold down the screen when not using the laptops and typically use them alone and do not really yet talk to my self when typing
 
But of course I am doing that while I type right now - such that what I write and do are different - paradox I guess. 
 
First time use here of the Roku built in to the television which is always on 24/7.  My viewing here is about 80% KODI and 20% Roku such that now I unplug the network interface to the television after I saw Roku pop ups while watching Kodi movies (reading the HDMI cable plus may be the microphone).
 
Really here didn't care much until wife started to ask about it.  This is levels above relating to wife questions about purchasing a $50 plus automated switch when a $5 analog switch works just fine.
 
and
 
really it's about the social engineering of common good AI if you are in to that.

I unplugged my Amazon Echo almost a year and a half ago, I tape over cameras and turn off microphones. I think a lot of what some of these companies do should be against the law. Why are they allowed to track you from site to site?

Yeh, I put tape over any cameras, even on my phone, front and back. I do have an Echo but just for development/testing so it's off the rest of the time. In the longer run, it's not difficult to imagine the internet become essentially unusable for anyone with anything to lose. It cannot be protected. No technical means can work, because there are hundreds of millions of naive users on it who are wide open for social engineering style attacks and who don't know enough to take even basic precautions. And those folks can then be used to go after less naive users (the Web of Misplaced Trust.) And, where there are technical means of attack (and there will always be), finding victims can be easily automated, so being a nobody buys you nothing. 

"The internet is the devil's gateway"
                                          Dan Aykroyd