Google could have recorded everything you’ve been saying around your phone for years. But do not fret, as it’s possible to delete this information.
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According to The Independent, Google quietly records many of the conversations people have around its products and just talking is enough to activate the recordings. This is news to me – apparently Google’s voice and audio activity page isn’t promoted heavily by the company. And now you know why – because it’s been storing your demands as well as some of your personal conversations.
Google’s voice search is supposed to just be a search engine that you can use with your voice, and storing this information is obviously beneficial to the company as a way to improve its language recognition. But this means it could also have accidentally been activated while you’re just having conversations with your friends or family whilst being near your phone.
Google has stored and saved all of these conversations and voice demands, which you can find if you head to Google’s history page and look at the long list of recordings. The company has an allocated audio page and another on your internet activity.
This feature was launched in June 2015, so it’s probably got quite the backlog of bullshit on you. Although this is not meant to be sinister, acting more as a sort of online diary on where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to, it’s pretty fucking creepy how much information is now being collected about you, some of which you may have thought was private.
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If you’ve been using an Android phone, which can be activated by simply saying ‘OK Google’ then you’re more likely to have more information stored. However, you could also have recordings on any device you’ve used to interact with Google. The most useful part about all of this is that if you visit the page, you can delete everything if you wish. Phew. And if you never want this to happen again, just turn off the virtual assistant and never use voice search. Kind of annoying if you use this feature a lot, but then who wants Big Brother listening to all their personal conversations? I think we all know which option is the safer one.
To read more about how our privacy is dead, click HERE.
