‘Ok Google’ Are you eavesdropping?

Technology has been making our lives easier and with the introduction of the artificial intelligence system and speech recognition facilities, we don’t even have to type anything anymore. But have you ever wondered or worried about a third party listening to your conversations? Recently Google’s confession has materialized our thoughts. They admitted that their employees listen to the customers’ audio recordings on Google Home smart speakers. The company clarified that they only listen to ‘snippets’ of the recordings to improve their voice recognition technology. The company released a statement that says,

“We partner with language experts around the world to improve speech technology by transcribing a small set of queries- this work is critical to developing technology that powers products like the Google Assistant.

Language experts only review around 0.2% of all audio snippets, and these snippets are not associated with user accounts as part of the review process”

Google also mentioned that recently one of the reviewers has violated their data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data. Their security and response team have been investigating this issue and take action as well. Another stalwart of technology also said the same thing that snippets are used as an aid to training artificial intelligence’s responses. In conclusion to this, there is only one question that comes to our mind is how safe is it to use these advanced technologies?

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