{"id":49377,"date":"2017-10-28T06:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-10-28T06:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=49377"},"modified":"2017-10-28T06:00:12","modified_gmt":"2017-10-28T06:00:12","slug":"google-is-recording-everything-you-say-to-a-bot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/technology\/internet\/google-is-recording-everything-you-say-to-a-bot.html","title":{"rendered":"Google is recording everything you say to a bot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google is recording everything you say to a bot<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Google is recording everything you say to a bot:- FOR THE past year, I\u2019ve been using the Google Home speaker to ask Google questions about my daily activities.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve asked about the weather, inquired about directions to a local pizza place, and tried to find recipes for blueberry pancakes. Nothing too major. A few times, my wife would ask Google about store hours at Costco and to find out about political news.<\/span><\/p>\n

This week, I found out that Google records every one of those questions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Using the My Activity portal, you can also find out everything about your life. Did you ask about the Miami Dolphins, or President Trump, or ask for directions to the cleaners? It\u2019s all there. Did you also ask Google about a local meeting of alt-right conspiracy theorists? Inquire about cancer treatments? Look up places that sell sex robots? It\u2019s all recorded.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a bit startling, because you hear your own voice, recorded as far back as a year ago. And, while Google reps claim this is something users have to agree to during set up, it\u2019s a little-known option called Voice and Audio Activity. Even if you disabled the option to save your internet history in Chrome, you\u2019re likely still being tracked in My Activity.<\/span><\/p>\n

It saves every movie you watch, the music you listen to, every YouTube video you find, all of your image searches, and just about everything you do online. (If you use Incognito mode in the Chrome browser, none of that activity is saved. You can also disable My Activity logging.)<\/span><\/p>\n

To hear your own voice, just visit the My Activity site. It also saves all of your internet browsing history for some reason, even if you have that disabled in the Chrome browser.<\/span><\/p>\n

The recordings and activity are saved every time you use the Google Assistant voicebot on your phone and in the Google Allo app, not just when you use the Google Home speaker.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle\u2019s MyActivity portal is both a blessing and a curse,\u201d Richard Henderson, a global security strategist at security firm Absolute, told Fox News. \u201cIt\u2019s a blessing because it really does provide a \u2018one-stop shop\u2019 of all your activity across all your various Google properties, like your Android phone, your browsing and Gmail, as well as the Google Home assistant. But it\u2019s also a curse because it really demonstrates the level of data that many massive technology companies collect in order for them to profit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Henderson says users are typically not aware that they are being recorded. Worse yet, if you do disable the voice recording, it \u201cneuters\u201d the speaker or other devices that rely on Google Assistant for voice commands. (Google reps confirmed this but said the speaker can still stream music.) There\u2019s no way of knowing how the recordings are saved and used, he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

Earlier this month, a reporter at Android Police discovered that a new Google Home Mini speaker was recording not just his own phrases when he said the \u201cOK Google\u201d hotword but everything being said at all times. Google permanently immediately resolved the bug.<\/span><\/p>\n

Amazon Echo speakers also record everything you say. The problem with voice-activated products is that they tend to obscure the privacy policies or list them only in an app.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThese devices require the user to opt-in to voice control or, with devices like the Amazon Echo, only listen for control words, such as \u201cAlexa,\u201d and only start recording once they hear the control word,\u201d says Andrew Howard, chief technology officer at Kudelski Security, told Fox News. \u201cThe challenge for consumers is that these devices can change their policies, often quietly, and it is impossible to confirm compliance with the stated privacy policies. Generally, consumers should use these new capabilities with a bit of caution.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\nGoogle reps released a statement about this issue:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle only stores voice-based queries received after recognising the hotword. Hotword detection runs locally on the device and if the hotword is not detected, the audio snippet stays local on the device and is discarded. If the hotword is recognised, the data, including the query contents, are sent to Google servers for analysing and storage in My Activity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0http:\/\/www.news.com.au\/technology\/online\/security\/google-is-recording-everything-you-say-to-a-bot\/news-story\/fcf90d5c6b20acb9cf35d1e6c029a3ac<\/span><\/p>\n

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