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Quote:Google Home smart speakers and the Google Assistant virtual assistant have been caught eavesdropping without permission — capturing and recording highly personal audio of domestic violence, confidential business calls — and even some users asking their smart speakers to play porn on their connected mobile devices.
 
In a Wednesday report, Dutch news outlet VRT NWS said it obtained more than one thousand recordings from a Dutch subcontractor who was hired as a “language reviewer” to transcribe recorded audio collected by Google Home and Google Assistant, and help Google better understand the accents used in the language. Out of those one thousand recordings, 153 of the conversations should never have been recorded, as the wake-up command “OK Google” was clearly not given, the report said.
 
“VRT NWS was able to listen to more than a thousand excerpts recorded via Google Assistant,” according to the report. “In these recordings we could clearly hear addresses and other sensitive information. This made it easy for us to find the people involved and confront them with the audio recordings.”

Google for its part on Thursday acknowledged that VRT NWS had obtained authentic recordings, but argued that its language experts only review around 0.2 percent of all audio snippets.