Google today said it will be more upfront about how it uses voice data collected by the Google Assistant.
If you ask your Google Home smart speaker or Pixel smartphone a question, Google does not store your audio recordings by default. But it recommends that you allow it because it can help the Assistant better understand your demands. Those who opt in, however, might also have versions of those recordings sent to human reviewers working on Google Assistant accuracy.
Those recordings are supposed to be anonymized, but over the summer, more than a 1,000 voice recordings from Google Home speakers were leaked to a Belgian media outlet, prompting Google to pause their collection.
"It's clear that we fell short of our high standards in making it easy for you to understand how your data is used, and we apologize," Google said in a Monday blog post.
Going forward, those who opt into audio recording using the "Voice & Audio Activity (VAA)" setting will "highlight that...human reviewers may listen to your audio snippets to help improve speech technology," Google says.
"If you're an existing Assistant user, you'll have the option to review your VAA setting and confirm your preference before any human review process resumes," the company added. "We won't include your audio in the human review process unless you've re-confirmed your VAA setting as on."
Google's voice assistant can also erroneously activate if it hears something similar to its wake word and effectively eavesdrop on a user's private conversations.
"The Assistant already immediately deletes any audio data when it realizes it was activated unintentionally," Google says. But the company is adding an option to let you calibrate how sensitive Google Assistant devices can be to the activation prompt "Hey Google."
"We're also updating our policy to vastly reduce the amount of audio data we store. For those of you who have opted in to VAA, we will soon automatically delete the vast majority of audio data associated with your account that's older than a few months. This new policy will be coming to VAA later this year."
Check what data Google Assistant has on you by visiting your Google account. Even if you've opted out of the VAA setting, Google Assistant will still transcribe your voice recordings. However, you can choose to delete them by visiting your account.