A German privacy watchdog has ordered Google to cease manual reviews of audio snippets generated by its voice AI. This follows a leak last month of scores of audio snippets... to the Belgian news site VRT... The Hamburg data protection authority told Google of its intention to use Article 66 powers of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to begin an "urgency procedure"... Article 66 allows a DPA to order data processing to stop if it believes there is "an urgent need to act in order to protect the rights and freedoms of data subjects". This appears to be the first use of the power since GDPR came into force... Google says it responded to the DPA on July 26 to say it had already ceased the practice... after learning of the data leak.

... In a blog post published last month after the leak, Google product manager for search, David Monsees, claimed manual reviews of Google Assistant queries are “a critical part of the process of building speech technology”, couching them as “necessary” to creating such products. "These reviews help make voice recognition systems more inclusive of different accents and dialects across languages. We don’t associate audio clips with user accounts during the review process, and only perform reviews for around 0.2% of all clips,” Google’s spokesperson added now.