Well, apparently not, from Slashdot: Google Contractors Are Secretly Listening To Your Assistant Recordings
A new report from Belgian broadcaster VRT News describes the process by which Google Home recordings end up being listened to by contractors -- and the scary part is that it apparently doesn't take much, if anything, to start a recording. While the recordings are not listened to live, audio clips are sent to subcontractors. The Next Web reports:
The Next Web reports:VRT, with the help of a whistleblower, was able to listen to some of these clips and subsequently heard enough to discern the addresses of several Dutch and Belgian people using Google Home -- in spite of the fact some hadn't even uttered the words "Hey Google," which are supposed to be the device's listening trigger. The person who leaked the recordings was working as a subcontractor to Google, transcribing the audio files for subsequent use in improving its speech recognition. They got in touch with VRT after reading about Amazon Alexa keeping recordings indefinitely.
SO what did I do about it? How-to-geek had instructions to turn off these recordings here,
Here's a a google search that shows even more information
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+home+recordings&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS723US723&oq=google+home+recordings&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.8519j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
which I did and promptly stopped google voice commands from working
From there, I found another setting, in Google Activity Controls
Make sure "Web and App Activity" is ON, and go to "Manage Activity".
It might be set to save activity indefinitely, "
Keep until I delete manually", I set mine to "Keep for 3 months", which is the shortest amount of time.
I haven't done the same for my spouse's yet, or my Google search
