Before I get deeper into this argument, the main point I was trying to make is that people are clearly assuming based on the headline that the transcript analysis happens in the cloud, and aren’t aware of them at least claiming that it’s fully on-device. If Google wants to steal phone transcripts, they can do this already, this feature doesn’t change anything about it.

Other than this… I know that people especially here are super wary of google and their privacy-related claims for very good reason. I am too. I know this is a very sensitive topic. But realistically, for this particular discussion…

“Ofcourse they will gather all that data, because why wouldnt they?”

There are so, SO many reasons why a massive company like Google, especially one that is constantly under scrutiny for their privacy practices, wouldn’t secretly record / analyze / store / whatever private phone conversations and tbh most probably just aren’t. There is immense regulation around this topic in practically all markets they operate in. If Google was found straight up sending transcripts of phone conversations to their servers without very explicit consent (aka more than some clause in ToS somewhere) it’d realistically be the biggest scandal in Google’s history, and likely significantly hurt, if not kill, at least their phone division. In many markets just the recording of phone conversations is already illegal, and Google can’t just do it anyway based on some ToS clauses — it’s just illegal.

I’m not trying to say that I don’t believe they do this because they’re good people or anything, but because from a pure business standpoint it’d be immensely risky for gathering data that is also hardly usable in practice due to how sensitive it is. The circle of people that would even be allowed to know of its existence internally would have to be tiny and extremely trusted to prevent leaks.

The truth is that they can amass so much data through other potentially dubious yet totally legal ways already, so an immense and illegal overstep of privacy convention like this is just unnecessary.