• by Wendy Davis , 3 hours ago

Google has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming that the company's voice-activated devices wrongly recorded conversations in people's homes, and disclosed snippets to outside contractors, according to court papers filed Friday.

If accepted by U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Jose, the settlement will resolve a dispute dating to 2019, when a group of consumers sued Google over the alleged privacy glitch.

The suit came soon after Dutch radio broadcaster VRT reported that Google Home smart speakers and Google Assistant transmitted consumers' conversations to the company, even when people hadn't first given the “Hey, Google” or “OK, Google” commands. (Those “hotwords” signal an intention to interact with smart speakers, phones or other voice-activated devices.)

VRT also reported that Google sometimes sends portions of users' conversations to outside contractors who analyze language patterns.

Before agreeing to settle, Google argued to Freeman that even if its Assistant had recorded conversations after mistakenly interpreting words or background noise as a command, the unintentional error wouldn't have violated any privacy laws or promises to consumers.

The company also sought summary judgment, arguing to Freeman that a privacy policy in effect between 2018 and 2022 provided that the company “may” collect “voice and audio information” when people use audio features. A summary judgment ruling would have ended the case in Google's favor before there had been a trial.

The plaintiffs opposed Google's request, arguing that Google "effectively embedded a live mic in tens of millions of individuals’ private lives."

“The record is replete with evidence showing that Google not only knew the Assistant frequently activated and recorded individuals in situations where they did speak a hotword, but purposefully used audio resulting from those 'False Accepts' to create data sets, train machine learning models, and improve its technology,” counsel for the plaintiffs argued to Freeman last year.

Google agreed to resolve the dispute before Freeman ruled on Google's request for summary judgment, but settlement details were not disclosed until late Friday.