Does Google listen? A report in Belgium says yes – World News



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Google is recording and listening to you at home, a Belgian TV broadcaster VRT reported on Wednesday.

"Google agreement. Can I hit my wife?" and "Pornhub" are just two of the thousands of phrases and excerpts recorded by Google and heard by the broadcaster, as a result of a leak of more than 1,000 records.

Although users accept Google's privacy policy, which states that Google logs users, the policy does not mention that people are listening to the recordings. Google also claims that it encrypts all of its records. One of the main problems is that Google collects confidential and identifiable information in which the voices are not changed and that addresses and working documents are not hidden. The VRT was even able to find at least two of the families without knowing it.

Of the thousands of recordings listened to by VRT journalists, at least 150 of them should not have been recorded. In other words, Google recorded private conversations that were not addressed to the app or Google Home. Google records information when people accidentally click a button on their phone or Google accidentally hears "OK Google."

According to an anonymous source, "Peter", Google outsources to a company the transcription of all these conversations. Contract workers often have to determine whether the speakers are men, women or a child.

"I have heard people who are clearly addressing their device, but also to random conversations," Peter told the Belgian news source. "Every month we receive a number of audio recordings.In my case, there are recordings in Dutch from Belgium and the Netherlands."

Peter said that there were hundreds of workers like him in the world. He chose to remain anonymous because he had to sign an exhaustive list of confidentiality agreements before starting his work.

Two other Google sources confirmed with VRT that this was how Google worked.

The anonymous worker remembered a shocking experience when he had heard a recording that he believed was violent and had heard a woman in distress.

Some of the most pressing questions are why Google does this and what are the consequences. That's why VRT approached Google about its findings.

"We are working with language experts around the world to improve language technologies by making transcripts of a small amount of audio recordings," Google said in a statement. "This work is essential if we want to develop technologies that allow us to create products like Google Assistant, and language experts analyze about 0.3% of all audio recordings, which are unrelated to any personal information."

"There is a legal problem in terms of transparency and security," said Jef Ausloos, a computer scientist at the University of Amsterdam. "Steps are being taken to limit the impact on privacy."

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