If you've used any of Google's voice services for Assistant, Maps, and Search, you will have gotten a lengthy notice about some major changes as to how and why it collects audio of what you say. These actions are a response to last year's revelations about how humans were contracted to review those clips and how some of them got leaked. The top-line takeaway here is that every user has been opted out of data collection.

Specifically, Google has opted every account holder out of the permission which lets the company log Voice & Audio Activity. Users will be able to find the toggle under the Web & App Activity controls in their activity controls — here's a link to that section.

Voice data that has already been saved will remain saved unless the user manually deletes it. You can delete samples by using the "Filter by date & product" box under the search bar on the Google My Activity page and selecting "Voice and audio" at the bottom of the list. Otherwise, data can be deleted automatically based on the Auto-delete setting for your Web & App Activity — 3 months, 18 months, or never.

The company is also clarifying how it uses the audio it collects, saying that it uses the raw data, unlinked to users' accounts, to train new artificial intelligence voice recognition models and assigns human reviewers to transcribe and annotate the clips to aid model training. The data is also used to help users' devices better recognize their voice so that it can pick up "OK Google" Voice Match requests — this data is tied to the account. The company does not collect clips of voice recordings made to other Google services nor of locally-recorded audio.

We didn't know that Google had been using humans in its process until the practice was reported on by Belgium's VRT last July when it was able to obtain thousands of samples that contained anything from mundane requests for restaurants to very personal location data and, in some cases, private conversations and activities triggered by the user's device falsely detecting the hot phrase "Hey Google," or "OK Google." The company took humans off of reviews in light of the report and promised to keep them off until it was able to "re-confirm" users' voice and activity settings — that's basically what is happening with this notification right now.

The Verge is reporting that Google will not assign humans to review voice clips that have already been saved up to when the new policy took effect.

Full texts of the relevant passages are available below.

Thanks: Nick