A user on reddit has posted about his experience as a new employee with a company that has access to voice recordings that he claims are commands given to mobile devices. According to this individual, some of the recordings specifically refer to Siri, Apple’s voice-activated search and command app. The reddit poster also implicates Microsoft’s solution, Cortana, and other posters have pointed out that Google is also saving Google Now commands. Although this user has access to the recordings, the employer is none of these major companies.
It is not clear how the recordings ended up with a third party. Access to the recordings is supposedly for the purpose of listening to the sound bites and comparing that with the generated text to help improve the voice to text translation. It may be possible the company has been hired by the major companies to provide this service rather than having this work done in-house.
If you want to get an idea of what information Google is saving, you can login to your Google account and surf over to history.google.com/history/audio. According to that page only you can see the history of recordings and Google does not provide any indication on this page that they share the recordings with others. In all likelihood, the recordings that are being saved are mostly mundane attempts at commands or searches. As the reddit user pointed out though, there are users out there trying some interesting commands that could be embarrassing if they got into the hands of the wrong person.
The problems caused by the way voice activation works are not new. In the past, Facebook has had to deal with claims that their app was always listening to users and more recently Samsung acknowledged private conversations should not be held in front of some of their smart TVs that are listening for commands. Voice activation is a great convenience for users, but as we continue to see, the potential is there for a lot of devices in our world to be turned into monitoring devices and now we see, all that data may be getting saved as well.
Does the potential for others to listen in on what you say, either live or via recording, cause you to adjust your behavior any?
source: reddit
Come comment on this article: Search apps, including Siri, Cortana, and Google Now may be saving recordings of your commands
