The German Data Protection Officer and the Hamburg Data Protection Officer check the GDPR-conformity of Alexa and Siri. As a result, Google stops employees from listening to conversations. Amazon is criticized because Polish workers are listening to the tapes in the home office.
For some time now, the companies behind the smart speakers such as Alexa, Siri, Google Home etc. have been criticized for transmitting the recorded conversations to the cloud and partially evaluating them. Amazon assured the adherence to high data protection standards, the information about the evaluation of German voice commands by Polish home workers, which came to the public, raised doubts about data security.
Google was also the focus of public attention on this topic. After the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Information Security opened an administrative procedure, the company interrupted the evaluation of acoustic recordings from Google Home by employees. The risk for the privacy for data subjects is high, because speech recognition is sometimes activated incorrectly even without a corresponding command. The interruption of the analysis serves to protect the rights and freedoms of the data subjects and is valid for three months in all EU Member States.