they quite literally are recording constantly. how else can they detect the trigger phrase? they only difference is that they are supposed to delete these recordings after the phrase isnt heard.

Imagine you look at every frame of a video. Are you capable of detecting if one of the frames of video has a bird in it without saving anything? Of course you are. That's how Alexa works. Stop falsely claiming it does anything else without proof. I'm all for criticizing Amazon but do it for legitimate things. We don't need to resort to fear mongering and lies to take them down. There's plenty of valid shit to accuse them of.

but who's to say that one of these devices is really doing that? it could include these recordings in it's next request to amazon's headquarters.

Because people analyze the network traffic.

regardless of what your phone does, having 2 recording devices is worse than 1.

This is just goofy at this point. I'm not trying to convince you personally to put an Alexa in your house. I'm just saying that it's a miniscule marginal amount of extra privacy loss at worst. It shouldn't surprise you people are interested.