Google Changes Voice Data Rules Following Privacy Scandal

Google pledged to do more to protect the privacy of users of its voice-activated Google Assistant devices, following reports that company contractors listened in on parts of private conversations.

The tech giant said it had paused the process of human transcription of Google Assistant voice records, and announced a number of new measures.

Via Google’s official blog:

Recently we’ve heard concerns about our process in which language experts can listen to and transcribe audio data from the Google Assistant to help improve speech technology for different languages. It’s clear that we fell short of our high standards in making it easy for you to understand how your data is used, and we apologize.

When we learned about these concerns, we immediately paused this process of human transcription globally to investigate, and conducted a full review of our systems and controls.

Google isn’t getting rid of human voice transcription altogether, though — it’s just promising to be more transparent about it.

We’re updating our settings to highlight that when you turn on VAA, human reviewers may listen to your audio snippets to help improve speech technology. If you’re an existing Assistant user, you’ll have the option to review your VAA setting and confirm your preference before any human review process resumes. We won’t include your audio in the human review process unless you’ve re-confirmed your VAA setting as on.