Amazon Echo Recordings will be Sent to Amazon, No Opt-Out.
Beginning on March 28, you will no longer be able to set your Echo device to process Alexa requests locally. All voice recordings will be sent to Amazon's cloud for processing. From Ars Technica:
One of the most marketed features of Alexa+ is its more advanced ability to recognize who is speaking to it, a feature known as Alexa Voice ID. To accommodate this feature, Amazon is eliminating a privacy-focused capability for all Echo users, even those who aren’t interested in the subscription-based version of Alexa or want to use Alexa+ but not its ability to recognize different voices.
Your option will be to let Amazon have your recordings (which they pinky swear they will delete after processing) or render a feature of your device useless. Why someone wouldn't trust Amazon with their recordings is not really a surprise. The Ars Technica article mentions several of Alexa's privacy blunders. My favourite (not mentioned in the article) is when Amazon sent a customer's recording to a random person in their contact list. Not to worry though, according to Amazon this is an "extremely rare" occurrence.
Amazon also allows humans to listen to your recordings. From Section 10 of the Alexa FAQ (emphasis mine):
Training Alexa with real world requests from a diverse range of customers is necessary for Alexa to respond properly to the variation in our customers’ speech patterns, dialects, accents, and vocabulary and the acoustic environments where customers use Alexa. This training relies in part on supervised machine learning, an industry-standard practice where humans review an extremely small sample of requests to help Alexa understand the correct interpretation of a request and provide the appropriate response in the future.
Once upon a time I had a couple Amazon Echo devices, a Dot and the normal sized one. I found it a little strange to talk to this device to turn on the lights, find out the weather or check a sports score. If I want to do any of those things I just use my computer, phone or tablet and type/tap away. When all the horror stories of privacy violations started coming out, I took those Echo devices, unplugged them, cut the cords and tossed them in the trash.
I don't need any device or company monitoring my every word and doing who knows what with them on servers who knows where. It's really not that hard to manually input a calendar entry or bring up an album to play. I'm glad this is one technology I've left behind.