What Do Amazon and Google Do With Voice Data?

It's pretty much a given that every web-enabled service will get hacked sooner or later. Imgur just released a 1.7 million account hack recently and while you may not have a lot of relevant personal data on that service, other services may have more data on them. Things like Amazon Alexa or the Google Assistant store voice data and can record you pretty much at any time. That gives me some cause for concern. I'm sure Google and Amazon take more precautions when it comes to security that companies like Imgur, it's still good to know what they do with the data, and how you can clear some of it yourself.

After you say your wake word, though, your Alexa and Google Assistant do start recording, and then whisk those clips away to the cloud. The hardware itself is pretty dumb. In order to let you know with a snap who the 23rd president was, or what the weather will be like tomorrow, or to play a Dokken deep cut, voice assistants need to be able to pull information from the entire internet. That means a faraway server somewhere is what actually handles your request.

Source: Wired