For me it's only showing recordings of voice search I performed. Not a single audio asynchronously recorded in two years. So not really "conversations people have around phones." And I also use Android Wear and Chromebook, so I'm probably more exposed to Google recording stuff.
When I'm performing voice search, it's obvious Google is listening. When I'm using a third-party aid or service, it is obvious they keep records. This is expected, and they let you delete them.
To perform voice search you have to say "ok, google", so phone needs to listen and to send to server every phrase it hears in order to check whether you said "ok, google" or just ordered a beer in a pub. I'm just trying to theorise.
It's easy to tell otherwise. If the OK Google detection was server-side, there'd be a constant flow of data trickling from the device to some server (at least when the phone detected sound). No such flow is seen.
* Sending all microphone input to a remote server would be really bad for battery life and data usage.
* It still works even in airplane mode.
* On ChromeOS (which isn't Android, but may share the same code) their privacy whitepaper [1] says:
If you opt-in to the feature, Chrome OS will listen for
you to say "Ok Google" and then send the audio of the
next thing you say, plus a few seconds before, to
Google. Detection of the phrase "Ok Google" is performed
locally on your computer, and the audio is only sent to
Google after it detects "Ok Google"."
Sending all microphone input to a remote server would be really bad for battery life and data usage.
It still works even in airplane mode.
I agree that they probably only send speech recorded after the activation words. However, I don't arguments think your arguments hold up. Speech data compresses exceptionally well and generally requires lower sampling rates and/or resolutions. So, it's feasible to compress the speech signal (possibly hardware-assisted), buffer it, and send it to the server at some regular interval or when the user wakes the phone.
Yes, it is possible for them to be sending all recorded sounds (even if the hotwords are not detected) to a remote server. However, as discussed above, there would be no legitimate reason for doing so—it is demonstrably true that the phone is able to recognize the hotwords even when a remote server is not reachable.
Reasonable, thanks. Question is if I said "ok ..." in a noisy environment or my accent is awful or I'm eating an apple, will android try to reqognize the phrase on server or not? If so, phrases similar to "ok, google" may be saved by google.
Like just the other day, I was having a conversation with my friend Snu. I said, "Okay Snoogle, it's time to dispose of the bodies of that couple we killed downtown last night.
Also, keyword detection algorithms are different from general purpose speech transcription algorithms. The general pattern is to write a specialized model that's really good at robustly identifying the key phrase, run that continuously, then trigger recording and full transcription only when the key phrase is heard.
Those keyword identification algorithms can be implemented at the hardware level. I believe this is done for specialized devices like Echo and Kinect, not sure how phones do it.
The 1st generation Moto X had a special minimal chip used just to detect you saying "Ok Google Now" (or a custom phrase) to turn the phone on when it was sleeping. But I think phones that only detect a start word when the screen is on probably don't have custom low-power hardware for it.
Transmitting every piece of audio the phone receives would kill your battery in less than an hour. They absolutely need to do the "ok, google" detection on board and the reason for differential adoption between various phones seems to be that for always on with reasonable battery times they need to do it on a DSP rather than the application processor.
What I found was that (when I still had a Moto X), it would sometimes 'hear' the activation phrase although I didn't utter it and records the next few seconds or so, until it decided that it cannot answer anything. So, in Google Dashboard I saw that it recorded some private conversation, though it was obviously not intentional.
This is clearly for clickbait. Only your voice search commands are recorded just like the history of what you searched using Google or your browser history.
The article speaks in "may"s and "might"s a lot, I can't find one concrete point outside the title, besides of course "after activation by speaking OK Google your audio is sent to Google". It seems to be clickbait indeed.
How is that new? Google is pretty much the only platform (i know of) that barely has issues with crazy swiss german dialects. Bots do not magically learn to understand this stuff.
Personally I think turn voice search on/off checkbox should be much more visible than it is now. Also I experienced at least one time when it was reset by Android update or Google Search app update, so now I have to check it is certainly off after every update.
Spooky, because I'm conscious about privacy & regularly check that my tracking is limited to only the things that I explicitly allow. Yet, somehow Google managed to flip it on for a few weeks over the past 2 years.
As someone else pointed out, 'app updates' or 'adding a new device' resets these settings. If I had one of those "always on" devices, it would have a lot more conversations stored, some that don't even start with the hotword.
The discussions about Google (et al) tracking show a strikingly similar pattern to discussions about clandestine government surveillance: a fairly even split between people saying "that's not what they're doing" (they only listen to explicitly triggered searches), "it's appalling that they're doing this" (it's a privacy breach) and "we've known they're doing this for years" (how else would they have such good speech recognition).
Almost all of mine are recordings of conversations I was having. Most of them sound like my phone was in my pocket and are very muffled, and very few of them have a transcript.
2 of the last 20 recordings are actually questions I asked. 5/20 have transcripts, and the rest are partial recordings of conversations I've had with no transcript.
> When Voice & Audio Activity is off, voice searches will be stored using anonymous identifiers. This information won't be saved to your Google Account even if you're signed in.
Huh. Pretty sure this wasn't available 6 months ago or so when I set up Google Now. You needed to opt in to search and app history to use Now, which included OK Google, or something.
Nonsensical scaremongering. I've reviewed my history for several months. I use voice a lot, especially in the car. My history only shows items where I've used Google Now (button press) or used keyboard voice dictation (SMS, Waze, etc. - also button-press). Easy to recognize, you even hear the beep at the start.
I don't have "OK Google" set to "always on" on my phone. Anyone who sees "strange" items may have that setting enabled.
PS Thanks OP, I wasn't aware of this overview page. Insightful. I appreciate Google allows you to delete the samples if so inclined. Where is this page on FB? ;-)
Both google and facebook are basically branches of the NSA that take and store everything they can.
It's amazing how some people will praise google for their privacy stance and put down facebook in the same sentence.
"Facebook doesn't respect your privacy" --Sent from google chrome on windows 10
And while I'm naming names Microsoft is the worst software company of them all when it comes to privacy. I'm not even going to waste my time looking up sources for my claims because we all know it to be true and anyone who considers them selves some kind of intellectual hacker is deluding themselves if they disagree.
If you are really paranoid, we've done a Python script for "sandboxing" the audio use in Google Chrome: https://github.com/nektra/ChromeAudioSandbox it is a sample to show the capabilities of our open source instrumentation lib.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 85.6 ms ] threadWhen I'm performing voice search, it's obvious Google is listening. When I'm using a third-party aid or service, it is obvious they keep records. This is expected, and they let you delete them.
* Sending all microphone input to a remote server would be really bad for battery life and data usage.
* It still works even in airplane mode.
* On ChromeOS (which isn't Android, but may share the same code) their privacy whitepaper [1] says:
[1] https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.htm...It still works even in airplane mode.
I agree that they probably only send speech recorded after the activation words. However, I don't arguments think your arguments hold up. Speech data compresses exceptionally well and generally requires lower sampling rates and/or resolutions. So, it's feasible to compress the speech signal (possibly hardware-assisted), buffer it, and send it to the server at some regular interval or when the user wakes the phone.
Those keyword identification algorithms can be implemented at the hardware level. I believe this is done for specialized devices like Echo and Kinect, not sure how phones do it.
Not if you transcribe it first, and upload compressed text.
[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US9087331
As someone else pointed out, 'app updates' or 'adding a new device' resets these settings. If I had one of those "always on" devices, it would have a lot more conversations stored, some that don't even start with the hotword.
2 of the last 20 recordings are actually questions I asked. 5/20 have transcripts, and the rest are partial recordings of conversations I've had with no transcript.
I want a setting where they automatically get deleted after processed, which does not appear to exist.
https://www.google.com/settings/accounthistory/audio
> When Voice & Audio Activity is off, voice searches will be stored using anonymous identifiers. This information won't be saved to your Google Account even if you're signed in.
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6030020
I don't have "OK Google" set to "always on" on my phone. Anyone who sees "strange" items may have that setting enabled.
PS Thanks OP, I wasn't aware of this overview page. Insightful. I appreciate Google allows you to delete the samples if so inclined. Where is this page on FB? ;-)
It's amazing how some people will praise google for their privacy stance and put down facebook in the same sentence.
"Facebook doesn't respect your privacy" --Sent from google chrome on windows 10
And while I'm naming names Microsoft is the worst software company of them all when it comes to privacy. I'm not even going to waste my time looking up sources for my claims because we all know it to be true and anyone who considers them selves some kind of intellectual hacker is deluding themselves if they disagree.
To get rid of everything, you can press the “More” button, select “Delete options” and then “Advanced” and click through.