Google is recording everything you say to a bot
 |
| GOOGLE SPEAKER |
I’ve asked about the weather, inquired about directions to a local pizza place, and tried to find recipes for blueberry pancakes. Nothing too major. A few times, my wife would ask Google about store hours at Costco and to find out about political news.
This week, I found out that Google records every one of those questions.
Using the My Activity portal, you can also find out everything about your life. Did you ask about the Miami Dolphins, or President Trump, or ask for directions to the cleaners? It’s all there. Did you also ask Google about a local meeting of alt-right conspiracy theorists? Inquire about cancer treatments? Look up places that sell sex robots? It’s all recorded.
It’s also a bit startling, because you hear your own voice, recorded as far back as a year ago. And, while Google reps claim this is something users have to agree to during set up, it’s a little-known option called Voice and Audio Activity. Even if you disabled the option to save your internet history in Chrome, you’re likely still being tracked in My Activity.
It saves every movie you watch, the music you listen to, every YouTube video you find, all of your image searches, and just about everything you do online. (If you use Incognito mode in the Chrome browser, none of that activity is saved. You can also disable My Activity logging.)
To hear your own voice, just visit the My Activity site. It also saves all of your internet browsing history for some reason, even if you have that disabled in the Chrome browser.
The recordings and activity are saved every time you use the Google Assistant voicebot on your phone and in the Google Allo app, not just when you use the Google Home speaker.
“Google’s MyActivity portal is both a blessing and a curse,” Richard Henderson, a global security strategist at security firm Absolute, told Fox News. “It’s a blessing because it really does provide a ‘one-stop shop’ of all your activity across all your various Google properties, like your Android phone, your browsing and Gmail, as well as the Google Home assistant. But it’s also a curse because it really demonstrates the level of data that many massive technology companies collect in order for them to profit.”
No comments: