Meanwhile, Android allows you to personalize voice commands based on its ability to recognize that a specific person is the one saying "OK Google". Voice authentication has already reached high accuracy with a few seconds of unconstrained text, or a few words of fixed text. Voice identification on open sets takes more data, but sub-minute clips are still reasonably effective.
At the very least, Google itself could make a credible attempt to identify whether the speaker in any voice clip heard by Google Home is a regular user, and plausibly de-anonymize users of OK Google. More alarmingly, we're told that about 1 in 500 Google Home clips is heard by a human, and this employee apparently shared "thousands" of clips with a news organization. It seems plausible that anyone with access to any large voiceprint database could attempt to obtain clips from a random contractor and de-anonymize the most interesting or salacious content.
Google says "the excerpts are not linked to personally identifiable information." To me that means the metadata is stripped, not that they strip anything out of the audio.
That said, it still sounds like Google is trying to convince us that the data they capture (not just the metadata) is never linkable to personally identifiable information, which if true would genuinely ease many privacy concerns here.
As far as I know, just because data is not explicitly annotated with PII doesn’t erase the legal (and ethical) responsibilities associated with handling data that contains PII.
So even if they worded their response so it’s truthfulness is legally/technically defendable, it’s still a bit of a ‘red herring’ at least (I don’t think anyone is accusing Google of explicitly associating these audio recordings with user IDs).
Even more fun, if you call a bank, you often have to key-in your account number (which can be easily decoded if your phone sounds back the tones, which most do), then tell you name, your address and sometimes your other PII like Social Security number or part of it. Record that call and that's a complete identity theft package, nicely wrapped, just replay it to the bank (which name you've also have recorded, if the user called on speaker, which they did because who wants to keep the phone pressed to your head all the time while you're waiting and listening to the muzak) and you get full access to the user's bank account.
Authentication on fixed phrases is reasonably accurate within a very few words, so at minimum it should be possible to associate "Hey Google" clips with regular users of Google Assistant voice control (i.e. "OK Google"). Identifying whether someone is present in a large dataset on open phrases is much harder, but a ~30s clip could do the job fairly consistently for anyone with access to a significant amount of voice data. And if this employee (who isn't directly working for Google) shared 'thousands' of clips with a news org, the cautious bet is that some other employee might share them with anyone willing to pay for the records.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
This might be a grey area for now, as both GDPR and listening devices are both quite new. But Google, Amazon & co aren't super popular with EU regulators and governments, so they might side with users' rights on this one.
It’s hard not to feel like this outrage is trumped-up anti-Google FUD. So many more worthy fronts to assail Google et al. on!
After all, they let you upload photos and video that are, per various policies and with some non-zero frequency, reviewed by humans — and users are begging them to do it more often.
’Yes, we hire people to listen in to and transcribe some conversations from the private homes of our customers (so as improve our speech recognition engines); but the recordings aren’t linked to personally identifiable information.’
Even assuming they have only the purest intentions here, I still don’t understand how they can possibly guarantee that these recorded conversations are not linked to personally identifiable information!
For example, what’s to stop me from saying “Hey Google, I am <full legal name / ID> and my most embarrassing and private secret is <...>”?
One might argue that they could detect this in the recognized text and omit those samples, but presumably the whole purpose of hiring people to create transcripts is because the existing speech-to-text engine isn’t perfect, and they need more training data.