Last summer, our colleagues from the VRT revealed that employees of the American firm were listening to and studying the conversations recorded by Google's virtual assistant. Following these revelations and the scandal they created, Google decided to put its listening program on hiatus. However, it seems that the American firm is about to resume its listening.
Several Google Assistant users have indeed received an email telling them that Google would resume listening to their discussions with its virtual assistant. The objective of this listening is always to improve the quality of Google Assistance's services, in particular its voice recognition technologies.
Users will be able to decide
But for the big comeback of its program, the Mountain View firm is playing the consent card since users can choose to activate or not this program, as it had announced. This will also be disabled by default. Users who wish to participate in the enhancement of the virtual assistant will need to enable the listen option. Google also offers more control over their personal data to its users by allowing them to delete their audio recordings at any time.
Google wasn't the only company that got caught up in the bag. The revelations concerning the listening by employees of the firm of conversations between its users and Google Assistant had followed those concerning the practices of Amazon in relation to its virtual assistant Alexa. Microsoft and Apple were also among the companies to listen to the exchanges between their users and their respective virtual assistant (Cortana and Siri), as well as Facebook via Messenger. In the case of Apple, the Cupertino company quickly paused its program before adding a consent option to be activated by its users.
High Tech
Google Assistant: An interpreter mode on a smartphone allows you to translate your conversations live
High Tech
Google Assistant: Your conversations with a connected speaker can also be listened to
- Microsoft
- Apple
- Personal data
- Amazon Alexa
- Siri
- High Tech
- listening