Enabled by default or not?

Posted Jun 18, 2015 8:18 UTC (Thu) by ber (subscriber, #2142)
Parent article: Chromium suddenly starts downloading a binary blob

Google's explanation says that the "hotword" module in question was not enabled by default. Their points and reaction seem to be reasonable, so we should still thank Google for providing a good Free Software webbrowser alternative. If this was a slip by Google (which is quite likely), it shows that that peer review enabled by Free Software is important. A good example of how the Debian folks being thorough are contributing to the IT world.

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Enabled by default or not?

Posted Jun 18, 2015 16:16 UTC (Thu) by testsilicon (guest, #96703) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not clear to me from the bugreport if any audio was ever unintentionally transmitted back to Google by unsuspecting Chromium users. If it was, then that was a serious breach of privacy. Can anyone clarify? Also can anyone confirm if hotword detection is done locally or in the cloud?

Enabled by default or not?

Posted Jun 19, 2015 3:06 UTC (Fri) by kokada (subscriber, #92849) [Link] (1 responses)

I think it is pretty clear that no audio was transmitted, since by default this feature is disabled. Quoting from the bug report:

"First and foremost, while we do download the hotword module on startup, we *do not* activate it unless you opt in to hotwording. 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."

Speaking strictly from Android (using Google Now, that has a similar feature), the hotword detection is done locally. After the user does a query (that happens after the user says "Ok Google", signaling that the user wants to ask something), this data is send to Google. I think something similar happens in Chrome.

Enabled by default or not?

Posted Jun 19, 2015 14:18 UTC (Fri) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link]

Just tested it here in Chrome (installed from Google directly on opensuse). One must enable the setting, and on a new tab "OK Google" starts a search. But Chrome asks if google.ca can have access to the microphone, like it would for any other site wanting access.

So the feature really only enables the microphone on the canned google search page, shown on (not quite) blank new tabs.

Enabled by default or not?

Posted Jun 19, 2015 18:05 UTC (Fri) by ranmachan (guest, #21283) [Link]

If you have the collection of audio samples enabled ("Allow google to use this data to improve the recognition" or somesuch), then you can actually look at your voice search history for your account at https://history.google.com/history/audio.