Google and third-parties are listening to your Google Assistant recordings
A group of information security specialists claims that human operators, in addition to third-party companies, have access to Google voice assistant recordings; this applies to both smartphones with Google Assistant enabled and Google Home smart speakers’ users.
The experts, in collaboration with the Belgian
news agency VTR News gained access to some audio recordings from users in
various locations (such as Belgium and the Netherlands); according to the experts,
some of these voice samples were recorded even without the device user
activating the assistant by saying aloud the phrase “Ok Google”.
Information security specialists say that
companies with access to these recordings take records with the intention of perfecting
speech recognition technology, and add that this activity is not only practiced
in Europe; “companies around the world have access to these records,”
they say.
The main issue is that this practice violates
the provisions of the Google Terms and Services, as its content does not
specify that any human operator has access to users’ voice recordings.
Researchers say the company tries to hide users’ personal information by
assigning them numeric keys replacing each user’s name.
When questioned in this regard, Google’s
spokespersons stated that the company takes and transcribes about 0.2% of the
total recordings taken by Google Assistant; “The sole purpose of this
practice is to improve our audio recognition technology,” they added.
Moreover, for the information security
specialists from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) this
report is just a sample of the multiple unfulfilled promises of companies like
Google about the privacy of their users, “the personal information will
never be completely safe in the hands of these organizations,” they say.
In previous cases the use of voice recognition
technology has been the target of multiple criticisms; users of devices like
Google Home or Amazon
Echo are concerned about the scope of the software that powers these
devices, because they believe that, in fact, users don’t really have control
over what these machines can listen to, record or send to external companies.
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