Yahoo Finance Apple, Google won’t listen to your conversations anymore
Earlier this month, Google confirmed its staff were listening in on your Google Home conversations.
Around the same time, Apple also announced its Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch allowed users to eavesdrop on other people’s iPhone conversations.
Also read: Google confirms its staff listening in on Google Home conversations
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On top of that, the Guardian reported Apple contractors heard confidential medical information, drug deals and recordings of couples having sex.
Amazon’s Alexa was also caught out letting language experts record, listen and transcribe anonymous voice recordings too.
Now, Google has confirmed it temporarily won’t let workers play back your voice recordings anymore, and has stopped transcribing voice recordings, BBC reported.
Apple will similarly suspend Siri grading globally to “conduct a thorough review”.
What about Amazon’s Alexa?
Bloomberg reported Alexa users who don’t want their recordings reviewed by third-party contractors can opt-out of it.
The new policy took effect on Saturday, and allows customers to select an option in the settings menu of the Alexa smartphone app to remove their recordings from a pool that could be analysed by Amazon employees.
“We take customer privacy seriously and continuously review our practices and procedures,” An Amazon spokeswoman told Bloomberg.
“We’ll also be updating information we provide to customers to make our practices more clear.”
The Alexa app will also include a disclaimer in the settings menu acknowledging that people might review recordings through Alexa.
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