Google Contractors Are Secretly Listening To Your Assistant Recordings

'A new report from Belgian broadcaster VRT News describes the process
by which Google Home recordings end up being listened to by
contractors -- and the scary part is that it apparently doesn't take
much, if anything, to start a recording. While the recordings are not
listened to live, audio clips are sent to subcontractors. The Next Web
reports:

VRT, with the help of a whistleblower, was able to listen to some of
these clips and subsequently heard enough to discern the addresses of
several Dutch and Belgian people using Google Home -- in spite of the
fact some hadn't even uttered the words "Hey Google," which are
supposed to be the device's listening trigger. The person who leaked
the recordings was working as a subcontractor to Google, transcribing
the audio files for subsequent use in improving its speech
recognition. They got in touch with VRT after reading about Amazon
Alexa keeping recordings indefinitely.

According to the whistleblower, the recordings presented to them are
meant to be carefully annotated, with notes included about the
speakers presumed identity and age. From the sound of the report,
these transcribers have heard just about everything. Personal
information? Bedroom activities? Domestic violence? Yes, yes, and yes.
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 says that the recordings are identified by numbers rather
than user names, but 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," reports The Next Web.

What does Google have to say about all this? That they only transcribe
and use "about 0.2% of all audio clips" to improve their voice
recognition technology.'

-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/07/10/2153210

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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