The technology giant has effectively turned millions of its users’ smartphones into listening devices that can capture intimate conversations even when they aren’t in the room.
If you own an Android phone, it’s likely that you’ve used Google’s Assistant, which is similar to Apple’s Siri.
Google says it only turns on and begins recording when you utter the words “OK Google”.
But the virtual assistant is a little hard of hearing. In some cases, just saying “OK” in conversation prompted it to switch on your phone and record around 20 seconds of audio.
It regularly switches on the microphone as you go about your day-to-day activities, none the wiser. Once Google is done recording, it uploads the audio files to its computer servers – often dubbed “the cloud”.
These files are accessible from absolutely anywhere in the world – as long as you have an internet connection.
That means any device that is signed into your personal Gmail or Google account can access the library of your deepest, darkest secrets.
So if you’re on a laptop right now and signed into Gmail – you could have a listen. Recordings last around 10-20 seconds on average, and a text version of the conversation is saved.
The giant states on its terms and conditions that it keeps these recordings for “improving speech recognition against all Google products that use your voice”.
Audio snippets are used by Google to improve the quality of speech recognition across Search.”
It recently launched a smart assistant, Google Home.
Mundane voice recordings from the general public will help its artificial intelligence that runs Google Home, by teaching it how humans naturally communicate.
In simple terms: it’s a free language class for its software. The tech giant also stores your voice recordings to improve its Siri assistant – but you aren’t able to access them.
Apple says that the recordings are anonymized after 18 months, so nobody would be able to figure out who is speaking.
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