In a scarily Orwellian revelation, Google is listening to everything you say.
Tech giant and the font of all pub quiz knowledge, Google, can quietly record many of the conversations that people have in close proximity to its products.
Your friendly pocket Big Brother lets you search the web with your voice using the voice recognition and virtual assistant feature, but using it could trigger a recording to commence.
As the features have been active since 2015, that essentially means two years of your deepest darkest secrets could now be stored somewhere in one of Google’s Palo Alto lairs, according to the Independent.
While the virtual assistant only responds once you Open Sesame with ‘OK, Google’, the microphone functions 2/7, so it can always be at your beck and call.
But, before you go all ‘Snowden’, there’s some good news: You can access all the information Google has on you by heading on over to Google’s history page.
The company has a specific audio page with a long list of recordings stored there and another for activity on the web, which will show you everywhere Google has a record of you being on the internet.
You can go there to listen back to some of the recordings and immediately delete them when your cringe-quota gets filled hearing yourself ask your smartphone to call your mum because you can’t be bothered to move your thumb a centimetre to the left.
The shame.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.