<story><title>Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth</title><url>https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>metric10</author><text>Has anyone actually confirmed that Chrome is continuously sending audio back to Google?  I &lt;i&gt;highly&lt;/i&gt; doubt that this is the case.  Instead, the plug in knows how to recognize &amp;quot;OK Google&amp;quot; all by itself.  Once activated, then it starts sending audio data.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;IF&lt;/i&gt; it where really listening even when inactive, then people would be complaining about it sucking up bandwidth and data allotments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>j42</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not about consistently being bugged though--I see two troubling implications to this;&lt;p&gt;a) Government A decides target B has valuable communications, and uses this audio capture functionality as an attack vector (ie, a MiTM server modifies the chrome binary blob request slightly to a version where chunked audio is sent back to a control server).&lt;p&gt;b) (more likely) This binary blob contains a voice recognition algorithm, which can of course detect the phrase &amp;quot;ok, google.&amp;quot;  Imagine they wanted to detect other phrases, like &amp;quot;drugs&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;travel.&amp;quot;  Small modifications could easily allow an arbitrary list of &amp;quot;hot&amp;quot; terms to be targeted.  Then no audio is even sent back from the user&amp;#x27;s computer--a small flag in your google account is simply set attaching your profile to &amp;quot;high risk&amp;quot; terms overheard, and databased, where it could later be queried by law enforcement.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s troubling because there&amp;#x27;s no transparency, and if you spend a little time brainstorming about the ways this could be used maliciously (most likely by a nation-state) there are many possibilities...</text></comment>
<story><title>Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth</title><url>https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>metric10</author><text>Has anyone actually confirmed that Chrome is continuously sending audio back to Google?  I &lt;i&gt;highly&lt;/i&gt; doubt that this is the case.  Instead, the plug in knows how to recognize &amp;quot;OK Google&amp;quot; all by itself.  Once activated, then it starts sending audio data.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;IF&lt;/i&gt; it where really listening even when inactive, then people would be complaining about it sucking up bandwidth and data allotments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Mithaldu</author><text>I just tried the feature out on my windows pc with chrome, and chrome only reacts to ok google when you have a new, empty tab, or the google search page open and active as the main tab. Additionally i checked with procmon what network activity chrome was making, and while it starts sending stuff AFTER &amp;quot;ok google&amp;quot; is activated, it doesn&amp;#x27;t send any between me saying it and chrome confirming it.&lt;p&gt;The theory that it&amp;#x27;s a small local plugin is also affirmed by the fact that my cellphone can do &amp;quot;ok google&amp;quot; without any sort of network, and is sometimes tricked into activating by audiobooks that make noises completely unlike &amp;quot;ok google&amp;quot;.</text></comment>