Google Assistant Conversations Leaked

VRT NWS was able to hear more than 1,000 sound recordings of customer conversations with the Google Assistant, Google confessed. And the conversations got leaked by the firm’s partners to the Belgian news site.

Google and Amazon, which takes clips from the Amazon Echo, are some of the companies who use these conversations. The companies saved these sound recordings to develop voice responses from their smart assistants. But they must always keep the information confidential.

However, Belgian news site VRT explained that a contractor gave it along with samples of the sound samples. And this is what VRT is using to recognize the person in the clips. Then, it inspected the kinds of conversations, which Google collect every time the user says “Okay Google” in a phone or a Google home product.

More importantly, VRT was able to listen to the addresses of the customers. Aside from that, it also heard a woman in the record who was in distress and some people discussing medical conditions. And Google admitted the leaked recordings.

Google Assistant Audio Snippet

In the blog post of David Monsees, Google product manager of search, he stated, “One of these language reviewers has violated our data securities policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data.”

According to Monsees, the firm’s partners can only listen to about 0.2 percent of all the audio snippets from the Google Assistant conversations. Also, they can’t access the user accounts even if VRT can identify the person speaking in the clips.

And if you are using the Google assistant and you are worried about your confidentiality, you can always delete your voice history regularly.

Similarly, Amazon saves voice clips of people speaking to Alexa. Also, it uses humans to examine clips. However, just like with Google, you can stop Alexa from collecting your clips by removing past recordings.