>You'd be able to detect it by sniffing the network traffic,
How? I can very easily come up with a compression/local storage + stream when app is being used mechanism to record whatever the app is hearing and sending it back to the mothership. Why is everyone assuming that the transmission is happening in realtime and not scheduled/hidden with usage?
I'm always up for a bit of google bashing but it's fairly ridiculous to assume they'd try and hide random bits of other audio in the snippets they send, google is staffed by actual humans, and if the us govt. can have whistleblowers, google sure as hell would have by now.
a) how would they know what data to send? if they're able to do speech recognition offline and somehow gauge how important the audio is prior to transmitting it then why the hell aren't they using this technology to absolutely blow alexa out of the market?
b) I've done some tracing on my router and seen minimal difference between data uploaded and the size of the voice clips you can freely playback in your google account history, not saying clever compression etc. couldn't cover this, but again - why?
Im definitely not implying corporations like google aren't more than capable of great evil and deserve to be watched like a hawk, but let's pick our battles?
How? I can very easily come up with a compression/local storage + stream when app is being used mechanism to record whatever the app is hearing and sending it back to the mothership. Why is everyone assuming that the transmission is happening in realtime and not scheduled/hidden with usage?