Are you an ardent fan of Google Assistant? Do you use it for communication, transit, shopping, web search and other day to day mobile operations? If so, you got to take a note of this mobile security alert on an immediate note.
Google’s Smart Voice Assistant is said to be recording your private conversation and sending them to the company servers for analytics purposes. And as per the sources reporting to our Cybersecurity Insiders, the feature which is actually designed to allow users to interact with a Google OS loaded device is said to doing more than what is being expected since 2016.
Britain’s news resource Daily Mail has gathered enough evidence that the Mountain View Company is pushing its Voice Assistant to record your voice-based phone conversations. And this is being done as soon as the Android phone user activates Google Assistant.
Note- For some reason, Google named its voice-based assistant service as simply “Assistant” and did not assign any name to it for some reason, unlike Apple Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. Google Assistant has the ability to search the internet, schedule events and alarms, adjust hardware settings on the user device and show info from Google user’s account. In near future, Google Assistant will be enriched with features such as identifying objects and gathering visual info with the help of a front camera and might also support purchasing products and sending money.
Mail Online reports that it has enough evidence on how the Assistant is recording the conversations that have to be private. The news resource adds that Google may also use such clips for its analytics projects in coming years and so all its Android devices storing these clips might also be transferring the content to Google’s central servers.
Supporting this theory is Google’s recently released My Activity feature that reveals exactly how much info the web search giant has collected about its users, through their online activities.
Google has reacted to this piece of news and released a press statement saying that it only allows Android phones to record conversations only when the hot word such as “OK Google” is detected. The internet juggernaut added that Smartphones using its Lollipop and after OS versions are into this business. Thus, it means all the previous versions are exempted from this conversation recordings syndrome.
Google is using such audio snippets to improve the quality of speech recognition across search. But added that it is never transmitted to the cloud.
However, no matter how much the said technology giant screeches, Android users aren’t sure what is being recorded and what is being transmitted in real.
And so, there is no guaranty that Google isn’t using our data for its analytics projects.
Therefore, from now on you better be careful while you type, speak, store and search on your Android Phone.
