• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

How Do We Get More Privacy With Google Assistant Turned On?

P

persistentone

Well-Known Member
I have a new Pixel phone and decided to try out Google Assistant. I enabled the "Hey Google" voice prompt, which when I authorized it I thought meant that everything other than "Hey Google" that I say around the phone is not being passed to Google's servers for processing. Apparently, I was wrong. I was listening to a song, and without warning, I got a notification from the phone with the name of the song I was listening to. That implies the phone is listening in to every sound around it and - in this case - when it was able to pattern match the sound to a song it let me know what the song's name was.

That's definitely more intrusion on privacy than I am comfortable with. Is there a way to turn that off? Ideally, I want the phone to listen for "Hey Google" and if that expression is not heard, I want the phone to keep any sounds it hears local and throw them away. I don't want to have to set 20 privacy options in 20 applications, but would prefer some global policy so that I can rest assured that the phone is not spying on me.
 
I have google assistant on and never had that happen to me. It only responds when I say the phrase. Been that way every since I have owned an android phone.

Maybe it's different on a pixel phone.
 
ocnbrze said:
I have google assistant on and never had that happen to me. It only responds when I say the phrase. Been that way every since I have owned an android phone.

Maybe it's different on a pixel phone.
Click to expand...

The notification I received was "Now listening to <name of song>". And that song was playing on the computer, not on my phone. Pretty damn creepy, actually.

For 999 songs out of 1000, the phone remains silent, so apparently this was a glitch. Nonetheless, that glitch could not happen unless some metainformation about the sounds the phone hears were being passed to Google's servers. I would like to understand the security and privacy model here better.
 
I seem to recall there being a distinct song recognition feature somewhere on my Pixel 2. I say "I seem to recall" because all I remember is turning it off!

Ultimately these things all come down to trust. All of these voice assistant things (Assistant, Siri, Alexa) have been found to pass on more than they advertised. All claim to have made changes. All are run by corporations whose duty is to their shareholders rather than to you or me. I personally didn't find it sufficiently useful for what it cost in extra data collection, but others disagree.

Even when I did test it though I never used the voice control. But the funny thing is that I've literally never heard anyone say "hey Google" or "OK Google" outside of Google ads, not in public, not in their homes. I'm sure that many people have it enabled, but I've never seen it used.
 
Hadron said:
I seem to recall there being a distinct song recognition feature somewhere on my Pixel 2. I say "I seem to recall" because all I remember is turning it off!

Ultimately these things all come down to trust. All of these voice assistant things (Assistant, Siri, Alexa) have been found to pass on more than they advertised. All claim to have made changes. All are run by corporations whose duty is to their shareholders rather than to you or me. I personally didn't find it sufficiently useful for what it cost in extra data collection, but others disagree.

Even when I did test it though I never used the voice control. But the funny thing is that I've literally never heard anyone say "hey Google" or "OK Google" outside of Google ads, not in public, not in their homes. I'm sure that many people have it enabled, but I've never seen it used.
Click to expand...

The "Hey Google" feature is actually useful. When I am working outside on a garden project it is very useful to get instant conversions from cubic inches / feet / yards. When I was talking to a worker who is a dependent of her mother, I asked Google what is the maximum income that a US dependent can legally make. Once you understand the kinds of questions that Google can answer, these verbal interactions are much better than typing out a search and reading search results. You have a verbal conversation and you just get the correct information and use it immediately. When it works, it begins to feel like human/computer interactions in Star Trek or other SciFi.

That said, my contract with Google should be that they listen for the magic words, and only then do they have my permission to pass my subsequent words to their servers. In no way will I ever trust a sociopathic megacorporation to record conversations without my knowledge and then try to convince me they have good intentions and privacy guards.
 
Last edited:
Search for 'assistant settings' in settings, there are a ton of things to fine tune! I turned off the song thingy, location and a bunch of other stuff but I do let the lady set alarms, tell maps where to go, call people, start/interact with Pandora and read texts etc. It's very intuitive but also very intrusive if you let it be. Go through every option/setting and turn stuff on or off.
 
Once you have enabled Assistant, your phone has to always be 'listening' to any sounds it can detect so when you say Hey Google that's its trigger. That's a given, every audible signal has to be monitored in order to catch that trigger phrase.
So you need to pick which is the priority, the convenience of using audible commands or the privacy of not having your phone monitoring all detectable sounds.
 
Brian706 said:
Settings > Display > Lock screen > Now Playing
Click to expand...

Thanks, I turned that off. But now it makes clear that Google could be listening to everything, and we have to dig through options to discover what can be turned off? That alone is disturbing. And what can never be turned off?
 
svim said:
Once you have enabled Assistant, your phone has to always be 'listening' to any sounds it can detect so when you say Hey Google that's its trigger. That's a given, every audible signal has to be monitored in order to catch that trigger phrase.
So you need to pick which is the priority, the convenience of using audible commands or the privacy of not having your phone monitoring all detectable sounds.
Click to expand...

The phone can listen locally for "Hey Google" without passing anything to Google servers. There should be a clearly selected option and privacy mode to have this feature always obey that general guideline. Instead saying that they are listening to everything on their servers and that I have to go through 1000 options looking for ones that I don't like is simply bad policy. Most people don't understand computers well enough to do that properly, and even if you do it properly it raises the clear suspicion that they are overstepping on privacy without notifications.
 
Brian706 said:
If you want my honest opinion, even if you turn everything off, I don't believe that they ever stop listening.
Click to expand...

I agree with you, and that's exactly why they try to bury us in 100 "privacy options" that are hard to find. They want to mislead us into believing that we have everything under control. What I need from them is not 100 privacy options, but one simple and clear option that lets me globally determine how much spying I am open to. Assuming I am willing to go beyond letting the phone listen locally for "Hey Google", then they can activate the other options.
 
persistentone said:
The phone can listen locally for "Hey Google" without passing anything to Google servers. There should be a clearly selected option and privacy mode to have this feature always obey that general guideline. Instead saying that they are listening to everything on their servers and that I have to go through 1000 options looking for ones that I don't like is simply bad policy. Most people don't understand computers well enough to do that properly, and even if you do it properly it raises the clear suspicion that they are overstepping on privacy without notifications.
Click to expand...

Simply because when any of us think that's how Google 'should' be doing something, that's just being idealistic, not pragmatic. The reality is a Android is what it is, something Google owns, develops, and maintains, and when it opts to covertly data mine our personal info that's either something we all need to accept or switch to an iPhone. The thing is, we have all agreed to allow this when we click through and ignore reading the Terms of Service agreement when we first start up our phones. And unlike other corporations like Microsoft and Facebook (or Meta or whatever), Google's ToS is written in plain, conversational language, not lengthy and complicated legalize.
 
Oh! I know how to turn it off! Go to my activity and head over to Google Assisstance, and it will prompt you on a kill switch, just kill it that way! I only have it on my tablet. :P
 
persistentone said:
Thanks, I turned that off. But now it makes clear that Google could be listening to everything, and we have to dig through options to discover what can be turned off? That alone is disturbing. And what can never be turned off?
Click to expand...
Google want people to enable everything and not think about it. So they make it easy to enable data collection and much more work to turn it off or even tell what is being collected. They also don't make it clear what does what, e.g. a few years ago there was a fuss because people thought that disabling location history stopped Google keeping a log of their location, and hadn't realised that app & web history allowed Google to log the location at which they used every app and so get the same information via a back door. But since the way Assistant works is allegedly based on your usage enabling it is basically giving up on any idea of limiting Google's access. The main thing limiting what they do collect and how is that too egregious a breach is likely to result in the thing they fear most: regulation of their activities (something that Google, Facebook, Amazon and the rest all spend large sums on lobbying to prevent or delay).

In fact I don't think you have shown that Assistant is sending anything to Google except when the keyword is activated, since the music thing is a distinct and specific feature unrelated to Assistant. This is also the impression their wording is designed to give. The problem is proving that they aren't doing this.

I personally expect that they don't transmit audio when you don't have Assistant enabled because if they did that and it was discovered it would be such an egregious breach that as well as the consumer backlash the authorities would have no choice but to act.
 
persistentone said:
The "Hey Google" feature is actually useful. When I am working outside on a garden project it is very useful to get instant conversions from cubic inches / feet / yards. When I was talking to a worker who is a dependent of her mother, I asked Google what is the maximum income that a US dependent can legally make. Once you understand the kinds of questions that Google can answer, these verbal interactions are much better than typing out a search and reading search results. You have a verbal conversation and you just get the correct information and use it immediately. When it works, it begins to feel like human/computer interactions in Star Trek or other SciFi..
Click to expand...
Yes, some people undoubtedly do find it useful. Personally I don't: if I'm around people I don't want to disturb them, and I don't find typing into a web browser any great problem for searches.

Moreover for anything more than a simple factual question (e.g. "what is the height of the Brooklyn bridge?") there are advantages in using a browser for searches rather than a tool like this: you get to choose your search engine (they have different strengths, weaknesses and biases) and you get to see a range of answers from a range sources. With Assistant/Alexa/Siri/Bixby/etc you get one answer chosen by the corporation behind it, and if you think about the various controversies about Google's search result rankings it's obvious that there will be biasses in that choice (obscure algorithmic ones, commercial ones, cultural ones, etc). Even without that it's far from unknown for the top result of a search to be out of date, so overall I prefer to have a range of sources I can select from.

As for unit conversions, if you use a sensible system of units in the first place the problem doesn't arise ;).
 
You cannot have both privacy and Google Assistant.

Or Google, for that matter.

In fact, I hate to break it to you, but if you used Assistant and/or Google to search for the maximum amout of income a dependant can make then undoubtedly Google has informed the authorities of that search and probably who that other person is.
They were tracking that persons location (with that persons phone) and your location with your phone, and they know exactly what the search contained and when the search occured.

This is yet another shining example of why I do not use any of this sort of crap.

I saw that the guys at my work were using Assistant when I started there.
They also were complaining about how during searches ads and other junk would randomly pop up that were associated with things that they had been talking about recently.

I had to explain to them that yes, your devices are tracking your every movement and now also are listening to everything around them.

One of my favorite things to do when I see someone attempt to use Google Assistant is to loudly say something like "Steaming dog turd in the snow!" and watch the hilarious results that pop up.
 
I'm too old school for voice control. It was fun back in the S-Voice days but once the novelty wears off, well, here's some samples of the last times I attempted to use both Assistant and Alexa before pulling their plug:

1. Hey Google, Turn on the living room lights

"Sorry, living room lights are not responding at the moment, try again later" (one out of three did come on)

Hey Google Turn on the damn Living Room lights!

"I can't connect to your WiFi right now"

2. Alexa turn on the patio light

"There's multiple devices by that name, which one do you want?" (no, there ain't!)

Alexa, turn on PATIO LIGHT

"There's multiple devices by that name, which one do you want? (there's only ONE light labeled 'Patio Light!)

Basically it was easier to automate using timers and motion sensors over IoT garbage that's notoriously unreliable and unpredictable.

The last was the Nest thermostat I replaced with ye olde 1970s mechanical thermostat (complete with mercury switches) because the Nest was freezing up the A/C due to it not enabling the higher fan speed on the HVAC. It was only using the lower speed for the furnace (what it does when the burner cuts off).
 
Using Android 13 on Pixel 6, I go to Privacy | Permission manager | Microphone. Under the "Allowed all the time" list there is nothing listed. But Google Assistant does respond to "Hey Google" ALL THE TIME. Google must therefore be listening all the time, and they are not following their own security model by listing Google Assistant in this microphone permissions list.

What gives with that?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom