The Irish Data Protection Commission has been notified by Google of its privacy breach in Belgium and the Netherlands, Bloomberg reported. Reports by Belgian broadcaster VRT showed Google employees and contractors had been able to listen to recordings made from people’s conversations with their Google Assistant, through Smart Home devices. The Irish regulator is Google’s main privacy watchdog in the EU.
Google responded to the VRT report by saying it had been working with language experts to improve its digital home assistant. They “review and transcribe a small set of queries to help us better understand those languages” and it’s “a critical part of the process of building speech technology, and is necessary to creating products like the Google Assistant.”
“We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data,” Google said in a blog post post. “Our security and privacy response teams have been activated on this issue, are investigating, and we will take action. We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again,” the company said.
A Google spokesman declined to comment about the regulatory review.
