It’s official: Google is listening to us

Company representatives have confessed that the Google Home smart speaker and Google Assistant service transmit users’ voice commands to company experts. 

Google product manager David Monsees has made an announcement, confessing that commands made to the Google voice assistant are shared with company employees who are familiar with the subtleties of the user’s language. According to Monsees, this measure is necessary purely for the improvement of technologies and continuous advancement of service quality.

He also noted that linguists analyze less than 0.2% of all commands made to Google Assistant. All transmitted commands started with the words ‘Okay, Google’ or activation of the launch button. 

The announcement was made as a reaction towards recent news about leaks of users’ personal audio data, which was caused by one of the company’s employees. As a result of the data security breach, more than 1 thousand commands fell into the hands of independent Belgian public company VRT.

The issue of confidentiality has recently become a hot topic. For example, Facebook has been the subject of many complaints about violations of users’ personal boundaries.