Google collected children’s voices, license plate numbers and car pool routes, privacy breach leak reveals: report
NY Post
A trove of leaked internal documents shows that Google collected children’s voice data, and recorded license plate numbers and car pool routes including home addresses, according to a report.
The privacy breaches included thousands of alarming incidents that were flagged by Google employees between 2013 and 2018, 404 Media reported Monday — and comes on the heels of the last week’s massive leak of some 2,500 internal documents related to its search engine’s mysterious algorithm.
Incidents reportedly included logging audio from roughly 1,000 children who used the speech command function to access the YouTube Kids app.
The company claimed it was a bug within the Google Assistant feature that was soon fixed.
“Estimated 1K child speech utterances was collected. Team deleted all logged speech data from the affected time period,” the leaked report said.
In another incident, a Google employee reported that Google Street View was storing license plate numbers in a database after the plates were detected by an algorithm that is used to pick up text, according to the outlet.
