If you brought an "Alexa" into a workplace that I had responsibility for you would be fired.

Immediately.

There would be no discussion, no second opportunities, no "oops", no thinking about it, no taking it back home.

You'd be handed a box and the guard would stand at your desk while you filled it with your personal effects, your access card would be revoked, your password shut off for the office network, and your ass would be out the door.

Period.

There are already enough issues with people having apps on their phone that might spy on them -- including turning on the microphone and/or camera without formal request.  The corporate espionage capacity here is off-the-rack already when it comes to personal smartphones, which is one of the many risks that nobody pays attention to but damn well should.

This is ridiculously specific, however, and intentional.

And by the way, if you think Spamazon will ever be held accountable when (not if) they steal some corporate secret and abuse it you need your fucking head examined.  May I remind you that the company has already, many times, almost-certainly done exactly that?

How many times has the firm had a fulfillment relationship with a vendor on their store and from that been able to determine how much product moves and where it's sourced from, then sourced the product itself and effectively forced out the vendor, destroying their business?

Oh, you say that doesn't happen eh?  There are people on this very site who say it has -- to them.

By the way that conduct is outrageous and actionable at best (while possibly being criminally illegal under the Sherman and Clayton acts as well); the implied term of fair dealing is part of all contracts, and you don't need to specify or negotiate it.

Have you ever heard of any attorney general going after Amazon for this sort of thing?  Has the FTC ever done so?  Are you telling me that it's not blatantly obvious that it has happened thousands of times simply by looking at all the items on which both Amazon and a third-party seller has the same item listed?  How hard would it be to look at who had it on the site first?

Amazon gains not only the knowledge of what's bought and from whom it also knows "for how much", in other words, what your cost as a vendor looks like.  Maybe not to the penny but it certainly knows what the ceiling is, because it knows its 15% commission rate, shipping deductions, the probable cost to ship it to their warehouse and your price.  It therefore knows the maximum you could have bought it for and remain in business.  This is information nobody else has, but gee, they've got it.

How hard is it to abuse that?  Very simple, and if even one time Amazon has solicited a supplier to undercut a third-party marketplace seller..... well?

Now you want to bring a spying device from this very same company into your building in which it must inherently listen to conversations that take place within range of it in order to work and it must upload that speech to its "cloud" in order to process it?

You're out of your fucking mind.