After Amazon, Google workers also listen to your private Google Home audio files, claims a new report

re might be more than Google's smart speaker listening to your private conversations and it's upsetting on every level. Google contractors can listen to your private conversations as well, claims a new report. Reports about Google subcontractors eavesdropping on your private conversation with Google Assistant comes only weeks after Bloomberg first reported Amazon's practice to let its workers listen to (at least some of) what you have to say to its Alexa voice assistant, aiming to improve its voice recognition.

Belgian broadcaster VRT explains how Google contractors end up listening to your private Google Home recordings. Although Google doesn't allow anyone to listen to your conversations live, re might be a delay as Google later sends audio clips to subcontractors to review. And in what could be even more shocking, Google Home Terms of Service don't mention anything about letting human contractors access your Google Home recordings, furr lacking transparency.

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VRT could access some of Google Home audio recordings and figure out addresses of many Dutch and Belgian Google Home users. Shockingly, some Google Home users hadn’t even triggered device's listening mode with help of "Hey Google" or "OK Google" command. Responsible for this revelation is a former subcontractor with Google whose job was to transcribe Google Home audio files in order to improve its speech recognition capabilities.

ir main job was to antate Google Home audio recordings and presume identity and of speaker. This way, Google subcontractors may have heard just about everything right from your personal information to your bedroom activities, and re's absolutely way to kw what specific type of information y have heard. Of course, this may t be limited to Dutch and Belgian users, since report has it that y had recordings from all over world.

Meanwhile, this is what company has to say:

"We work with langu experts around world to improve speech techlogy by making transcripts from a small number of audio clips. This work is crucial for development of techlogy that makes products such as Google Assistant possible. Langu experts judge only about 0.2% of all audio clips that are t linked to personally identifiable information."

Google added:

"We have recently learned that one of se langu experts may have violated our data security policy by leaking Dutch-langu audio clips. We are actively investigating this and when we find a breach of our policy, we will take action quickly, up to and including termination of our agreement with partner."