Tips & Tricks

Google Home And Amazon Echo Quietly Recording Everything You Say. How To Stay Protected?

Preeti Seth
Published 2017-05-30

Welcome to a lifetime of luxurious comfort with smart home voice assistant devices: Google Home and Amazon Echo. You can know the weather, news, turn off lights and listen to your favorite songs while in bed and without having your phone around.

These little talking cylinders are always listening to you and work as elephants which never forgets. This smart home technology is indeed a beautiful thing which makes our life and work easier. As the saying goes, all good things comes with a cost. This is entirely true for these as they record all what we say and eavesdrop, thus costing quite a bit of privacy.

They work as Siri for our home and send all recorded audio clips to Google and Amazon servers. But they work only if you have an active internet connection or the hotword is said. If any of the things are missing they can’t understand and reply to you.

But privacy is still an issue so why not make their memory like a sieve. Fortunately, we can purge all these recordings by following simple steps provided below:

How to delete Alexa Voice Recordings with Alexa App

There are a different ways using which you can manage the history of your voice recordings. You can use the Alexa app on your mobile device or the Alexa web interface on your desktop.

Here, we show you steps of using Android app, but the steps are almost the same on the other platforms.

  1. Launch the Alexa app. Now go to Settings > History to look up for the list of your past Alexa requests.

  1. Here, you will see list of all the recordings. Tap on a recording that you wish to delete and then tap on Delete voice recordings.

Alternate way to delete all voice recordings

You can delete the voice recording in one go by visiting Amazon website www.amazon.com .

  1. Now, login to your Amazon account. Here login to your account and under your login name click on Manage Your Content and Devices and select the Your Devices.

  1. Now, select your Echo device and then select Manage voice recordings under your Echo’s name. 
  2. You will now see a disclaimer read through it and then select the Delete button.

That’s it. All of your voice recordings will be deleted.

Note: Before deleting the voice commands you can playback each voice command. It will help you keep those important commands that you want to use. You can use Amazon app to remove the recordings individually, if you want to delete all at once visit Amazon website.

Another way to stop the Amazon Echo from recording

When Amazon Echo is recording the voice commands you will see that the indicator ring flashes blue. To stop it from recording you can turn on the Mute button.

To turn it on, tap the microphone button. As you will press it you will see a glow on the mute button and the indicator ring will turn red. This indicates that the device is no longer operational and will not accept voice commands until the microphone is enabled again.

How to delete your Google Assistant voice recordings

  1. To delete your voice recordings, open google.comin a web browser.  
  2. Sign in to your Google account.
  3. Click on Filter by date & product 
  4. Now under Filter by Google product check only Voice & Audioand hit the search button. 
  5. Once you click on the Search button it will show you all the recording. From here, you can delete individual recordings or entire days of activity. Just click on the three dots at the right hand of any selected activity and select Delete.
  6. To delete all voice activity, click the action overflow button in the search bar and select Delete results.

To delete any activity by date or product, follow the steps below:

  1. Open google.comin a web browser.
  2. Click the action overflow button in the top left of the page.
  3. Select Delete activity by.
  4. Select a date or date range that you want to delete.
  5. Click Delete and confirm by clicking OK.

To delete your voice recordings from your phone or tablet, follow the steps below:

  1. Open the Google Home app on iOSor Android.
  2. Tap the hamburger button in the top left corner.
  3. Select More Settings.
  4. Now click on My Activityyou will find it at the very bottom of the screen.
  5. Tap the action overflow button beside individual recordings or day summaries to delete selectively.
  6. To delete by date range, tap the action overflow button in the right part of the search bar.
  7. Select Delete activity by.
  8. Tap OKto confirm.

How to turn off Voice & Audio Activity

Not only you can delete the recording but you can also stop Google from saving your voice recordings and audio activity. To stop it go to your account under Activity controls in your Google account settings.

To access it open myactivity.google.com from a web browser. Now sing into your account and click the hamburger button in the top left of the page.

Select Activity controls in the menu. Scroll down to Voice & Audio Activity and slide the button to pause Voice & Audio Activity.

Note: Voice searching with Google Assistant (including Google Home speakers) will stop working until you re-enable it.

Protective measures

Those who use these voice assistants should know that there is no 100% privacy. As you allow Amazon Echo and Google Home to listen, they have all the data of said unsaid things. But there are things you can follow to limit the risk of accidental consequences.

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