Google contractors are secretly listening to your Assistant recordings

guest · Jul 10, 2019

Google contractors are secretly listening to your Assistant recordings
July 10, 2019
https://thenextweb.com/google/2019/...retly-listening-to-your-assistant-recordings/

Not only is your Google Home device listening to you, a new report suggests there might be a Google contractor who’s listening as well. Even if you didn’t ask your device any questions, it’s still sending what you say to the company, who allow an actual person to collect data from it.
A new report from Belgian broadcaster VRT News describes the process by which Google Home recordings end up being listened to by contractors [...]

While VRT only listened to recordings from Dutch and Belgian users, the platform the whistleblower showed them had recordings from all over the world – which means there are probably thousands of other contractors listening to Assistant recordings.
The VRT report states that the Google Home Terms of Service don’t mention that recordings might be listened to by other humans.

The report did say the company tries to anonymize the recordings before sending them to contractors, identifying them by numbers rather than user names. But again, VRT was able to pick up enough data from the recordings to find the addresses of the users in question, and even confront some of the users in the recordings – to their great dismay.
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guest · Jul 11, 2019

Google goes after whistleblower who revealed it sends voice recordings for transcription
July 11, 2019
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquire...ssistant-voice-data-third-party-transcription

Google Assistant devices are recording users and sending the data for transcription, sometimes without a wake-word, according to a new report.

The whistleblower, who went to VRT after hearing the allegations surrounding Alexa, confirmed that he worked for a sub-contractor, paid by Google, to transcribe and annotate recordings, including presumptions of the speaker's age and other demographics.
What's particularly notable about this is the fact that nowhere in Google's T&Cs does it mention anything about recordings being listened to by another human being. That's the sort of thing you'd think it'd want to make clear.

Rather than confront this, Google has suggested its more interested in finding the whistleblower for breaching its security policies than righting the wrong.

"We just learned that one of these reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data," it said. "Our Security and Privacy Response teams have been activated on this issue, are investigating, and we will take action. We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again."
Although Google says that data is anonymised before it is sent, this first-hand account suggests that it's not hard, in some cases, to work out exactly who is talking and what they're up to.
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Minimalist · Jul 11, 2019

I wonder what GDPR watchdogs will say about this hidden sharing of personal data.

kls490 · Jul 11, 2019

mood said: ↑

Google goes after whistleblower who revealed it sends voice recordings for transcription

..."We just learned that one of these reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data," it said. "Our Security and Privacy Response teams have been activated on this issue, are investigating, and we will take action. We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again."
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Interesting...how Google is quite-obviously attempting to deflect attention from its own questionable conduct (I.e., by not disclosing the fact it sends those voice recordings for transcription in its own T & C's), but instead, tries to peg the whistle-blower as the "bad guy".

Who's the real problem here?

guest · Jul 14, 2019

Google Data Breach Faces Review by Irish Privacy Watchdog
July 12, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...breach-faces-review-by-irish-privacy-watchdog

Google faces a possible investigation by Irish data privacy regulators related to reports that contractors had been able to listen to audio of users of its digital assistant technology.

The Irish Data Protection Commission received a breach notification from the company late Thursday, said Graham Doyle, the agency’s spokesman. Google reacted in a blog post on Thursday after reports by Belgian broadcaster VRT that contractors could listen to recordings made from people’s conversations with their Google Assistant.
The Irish regulator is Google’s main privacy watchdog in the EU and could, if serious violations are found, levy hefty fines under the bloc’s new data protection rules.
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Minimalist · Aug 2, 2019

Google contractors told to stop listening to conversations captured on your Home assistant… for now, in Europe at least

Google has agreed to temporarily stop listening to audio captured by its Google Home smart speaker across the European Union… after an investigation was started by German regulators.
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https://www.grahamcluley.com/google...ur-home-assistant-for-now-in-europe-at-least/

guest · Sep 23, 2019

Google Assistant no longer saves voice recordings by default
September 23, 2019
https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/23/google-assistant-no-longer-saves-voice-recordings-by-default/

Google Assistant no longer stores recordings of user’s voices by default, Google announced today. VentureBeat reached out to Google for clarification on when it changed its policy to store voice recordings.

Now people who interact with Google Assistant will have to opt-in with the new Voice & Audio Activity (VAA) program when setting up their Google Assistant to have their voice recorded or reviewed by humans.
Google Assistant users will also soon be given the option to reduce the sensitivity of the AI assistant’s response to the “Hey Google” command.

The series of changes were introduced after Google paused human review of recordings this summer.
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