>What I don't understand is why they have to store voice recordings instead of deleting them once they understand the vocal command.

They don't have to. You can disable it at https://myactivity.google.com

try disabling Google Maps location access permission. For me it triggers an endless loop requesting Location permission, rendering the app unusable.

Google's always mining data behind the scenes and gapps are constantly phoning home, your "opt-out" preferences are meaningless.

This is one of those massive privacy violations that I cannot believe has been allowed to exist as long as it has without people making a concerted effort against it. I remember way back in the early days of Android when it was excused for reasons of allowing Google's live traffic mapping feature to work.

That excuse made sense in a time where public trust in these companies was justifiably high but it's turned into a situation where the major tech giants have the power to become a modern day Stasi on steroids (and increasingly show their willingness to play that role). We had to place enormous trust in these company's ethics (mostly on a subconscious level as they all used to go to great lengths to afford us the ability to implicitly trust them) in order for the smartphone/mobile revolution to occur. Now that these devices are a necessity in modern society, they've all dropped the pretenses that allowed us to trust anything to do with the information they're collecting.

We're living in a cyberpunk dystopia and I don't see an easy way out.

Fortunately OSMand works reliably (and offline).

It's to train their speech recognition and intent recognition systems. They probably also use the data to prioritise which queries they add support for.

>except the Play store

Workaround:

1)Install F-Droid (f-droid.org) 2) Install Yalp Store from F-Droid

Even if you do this, on a standard Android device, there is still Google Play Services installed, which has every permission available on your device. You have to install a fresh custom ROM like LineageOS without GApps to avoid this.

Good point. You should install LineageOS first, you can then select the GApps bundle size you need or try and replace them with FOSS alternatives. For me, Yalp Store has made using LineageOS + minimal, permission sandboxed google services a bearable experience.

> What I don't understand is why they have to store voice recordings instead of deleting them once they understand the vocal command. There could be a number of reasons and I don't like any of them.

Not that I have any insider information but a while back someone made a post on reddit about what baffles them about their work and they had a job where they basically listened to very short voice clips and saw something on the screen and they had to decide whether it was the right word on the screen or not.

There are tons of phone systems that use speech recognition and warn you that you are being recorded for quality assurance purposes. I would assume those recordings come from that type of system. Google and Amazon have been clear that humans will not be listening to the recordings.

Are you trying to say these home assistants are basically mechanical Turks?

Most likely the human verification is not in real time but for quality improvements after the facts.

In case you weren’t joking.