Mr. William Malcolm:

We fundamentally believe in the principle of privacy by design. We have a robust set of requirements internally that implement GDPR requirements, including producing, very early, technical design documents that look at the privacy features of devices. A key principle with the assistant, right from the beginning, was making sure that individuals knew what voice data was recorded, and that they had access to it, that they could play that back, that they could delete it all, and that they could delete a single item. We had opt-in consent to the collection of that voice and audio data right from the start. It was really important to us that that transparency, that user choice, and that ability to delete the data existed from day one and that was a fundamental principle of the assistant when we launched it. We very much look to put privacy by design at the heart of the assistant.

On notice, transparency and choice, I am very proud of the work the Google teams have done. Our dashboards and tools are industry-leading, but we always accept we can do more and that is why we are looking at this issue of misactivations. Is there more we can do to make users aware of how that occurs in our notices? Also, is there more we can do to give users control over the sensitivity of the settings? It is difficult in environments where there is a lot of noise, and some microphones can mishear. We acknowledge that but we are doing work to give users more control over the sensitivity of the settings, and to always put them in control of how that information is then retained and deleted. Our teams have taken that very seriously with assistant from the beginning because they recognise that users using these devices need to place trust within them and trust with Google.