You might be familiar with the features of a Mobile personal assistant like Siri, Cortana, and Google now in the Apple, Windows and Android platform respectively. Your daily usage of your Smartphone might have made a lot of Audio requests to the devices you carry. Nowadays who doesn’t love a virtual assistant?
And as they have been evolving and fulfilling the need of people with the help of the Internet, they much rejoice. However, you may not have realized that Google always tracks record of every word you search. Similarly, it also keeps a record of all the audio requests you do with your Smartphone.
It’s not that other platforms don’t do such. Even Siri records all the audio requests for two years. And so does the Cortana but we don’t know for how long time. The difference is that Siri and Cortana have the options to remove such recording or data with the deactivation. In Cortana, the user himself gets to choose what type of information to be stored and what kind of not to be stored.
Saving those data are useful in some cases as to know the preference of the user and act according to it in the future. This is what machine learning is like. When Mobile devices can collect data and go through the information, they get knowledge about the user. However, it’s user rights if he or she wants to share the information or not. Previously Google didn’t have that feature.
However, the Feature of privacy is not sure up to now, but Google has thought about the privacy control launching in the new version of Android where you get to choose what kind of privacy setting do you want for your phones. It usually surprised the user after they got to know that their phones are storing their audio requests. The companies say that this information is for the betterment of such Apps, but they should also consider the privacy concerns of people.
On its website, Google says these recordings help it better recognize your voice — and more accurately accomplish tasks. We don’t know how long Google tends to keep those audio files, but you surely weren’t aware of your requests being stored in the servers.