Google Silently Listens to your Conversation
This issue came to light by Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge, who says Google has silently installed black box code into the open-source Chromium browser, meaning it contains pre-compiled code that users cannot see.
Exactly what this black box does is still unclear, but Falkvinge claimed that Google is listening to the conversations of Chromium users through this black box of code.
The ‘black box’ code enabled a feature that activates a search function on the browser when you say “Ok, Google,” however the code enabled the microphone, as well as permitted to capture audios.
Google was under fire of downloading and installing a Chrome extension secretly and subsequently listened to the conversations of Chromium users without consent.
After these accusations, a wave of criticism by privacy campaigners and open source developers has led Google to remove the extension from Chromium, the open-source version of the Chrome browser.
The extension in question is “Chrome Hotword,” which was found to be responsible for offering the browser’s famous “OK, Google” functionality.
What Google Says –
Google since defended itself, arguing the ability to use “Ok Google” commands and enable the extension is an opt-in feature.
“First and foremost, while we do download the hotword module on startup, we do not activate it unless you opt into hotwording,” Google wrote on its development forums.
“If you go into ‘chrome://settings,’ you will see a checkbox ‘Enable ‘Ok Google’ to start a voice search. This should be unchecked by default, and if you do not check it, the hotword module will not be started.”
Google also argued that Chrome is not open source and if any of the open source distributors such as Debian have any issue with it, they should disable the module themselves.
However, after receiving complaints about the “bug” that automatically installs the Chrome Hotword Shared Module without an opt-out configuration, Debian has fixed the issue by disabling the extension in their distribution of Chromium.
The impact on you at home: Regular Chrome users have the same extension included in their browser that Chromium used to, as well as many other bits of proprietary code that are not found in Chromium. If you don’t like the notion of hotword detection, simply don’t enable it in your settings. But without access to the source code it’s not possible to know for sure that the hotword detection feature only accesses your microphone when enabled and only on Google search sites. If that notion disquiets you, there’s always Firefox.
Final Result :
Google removed the chromium voice extension after after spying concerns.