Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 3 December 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Data Collection by Digital Assistants: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. William Malcolm:

Back in early July, around 10 July, we became aware through press in the Netherlands and Belgium that recordings of users had been made available to the press. We conducted an internal investigation and we determined that those recordings were from Google users and that there was an unauthorised disclosure by that vendor. We took immediate steps to terminate the vendor's access. We also took the steps, as has been covered, of pausing audio transcriptions globally while we investigated.