How to Prevent Google From Saving Your Voice Recordings
The unfortunate trade-off of a smart speaker is obvious: for convenience, having something to shout at, it can tell you what the weather is, what traffic, and if your front door is unlocked (to name just a few). items), you must transfer your privacy to a giant legal entity.
In turn, the said company may channel your verbal thoughts to random employees around the world under the guise of “technological improvements”, or they may simply keep an archive of everything you say so that your device can become “smarter” by providing you with more up-to-date information. and, at the same time, help these companies get more detailed information about you for no particular reason (cough ad).
As much as we advise Amazon fans from time to time to consider deleting your saved Alexa entries and stop giving Amazon tons of access to what you say , Google smart device users should adopt the same mindset. Luckily, finding and removing your information from Google’s servers is just as easy, and you can even prevent Google from creating your archive from the start.
Search and delete your voice and audio recordings in Google Home
First, visit Google’s My Activities page. If you’ve never been here before, get ready to spend a little time looking at everything you’ve done with Google services – it’s exciting. Scary but addicting.
When you’re ready to start deleting your voice recordings, click the Filter by Date and Product option below the search bar in the Package or Item view. Deselect everything by clicking All Products, then scroll down and select Voice & Audio. Scroll back and click on the blue magnifying glass.
You will now see a list of everything you said to your Google Home device. I hope your life is as boring as mine:
To proceed with deletion, simply click the three-dot icon to the right of the search box and select Delete Results. Say goodbye to everything you said to your Google Home.
Force Google to stop storing voice recordings
You can prevent Google from keeping track of what you say to your smart devices, but to do this, you will need to go to a different screen. Click on Action Controls in the far left sidebar and then scroll down a bit until you see Voice and Sound Actions.
When you are about to “pause” Google’s collection of data, you will receive a big, daunting warning that it will make it harder for Google to provide you with more up-to-date information. The smart speaker may not even recognize your voice .
When you pause, it seems that whatever you say to your smart speaker is not being recorded or saved to Google. When I checked this, the commands I was sending to my Google Home were not showing up in my action list, but the Google app seemed to pick up the erroneous “what time is it?” – perhaps from an Android smartphone located next to my desk? Maybe a weird splash due to the fact that I turn this feature on and off pretty quickly?
I still don’t understand this part a little, so you should still check the activity log from time to time in case your speaker, your smartphone, or someone else knows they are still picking up your voice requests. If you find that you can’t see anything when you search for voice and audio activity, you can probably reduce the number of checks in the future.