Do Companies Listen to Your Voice Recordings?

Yes. In 2019 reporters showed that people working for Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook listened to some of the voice clips their products recorded. Each company then paused, limited or disclosed the practice. For Apple, human review is now something you opt into, and the only sure way to keep anyone from hearing your audio is to keep it on your own device. This guide sets out the documented timeline, the lawsuits that followed, what the review programs look like now, and what you can check yourself.

In 2019 five major platforms were found to use people to review voice clips

Within a few months of each other in 2019, reporters documented human review at five companies. In some cases, the users whose clips were reviewed had not been told clearly in the product or its terms. The table shows what was found and what each company did in response.

Apple's program was called grading, a process in which people checked how Siri handled a request. The Guardian reported in July 2019 that Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information and drug deals in those clips ¹. Apple told the Guardian that less than 1% of daily Siri activations were used for grading ². That is Apple's own figure, and it shows the share of activations graded, not the number of people who heard them.

Google's review was smaller in scale but more exposed. Google said in July 2019 that language experts review only around 0.2 percent of all audio snippets ³. The same month it said one of its language reviewers had violated its data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data ⁴.

Amazon's response was an opt-out. It changed Alexa's settings so that users could stop their voice recordings being reviewed manually, a change it made after Bloomberg reported the practice ⁵. Microsoft's response was also a disclosure. After questions about Skype Translator and Cortana, Microsoft said that "we could do a better job specifying that humans sometimes review this content" ⁶.

Facebook's review concerned Messenger. The company said it had paused human review of audio more than a week before its statement, and that it would follow Apple and Google in curtailing the practice ⁷.

Three limits apply to every figure in this section. The reports show what reviewers were able to hear, not how many people heard a given clip. The company statements are self-reported, and the pages I read do not show independent audits. Most of the disclosures date from 2019, so the current picture comes from later policies and settings, which the sections below cover.

Accidental wake-ups mean some recordings were never meant for a company

Reviewers do not only hear the commands you meant to give. A voice assistant that wakes by mistake records whatever comes next, and that clip can reach a person. Researchers call this a false accept, and it is the mechanism behind the Google lawsuit described below. The question of how often it happens is covered in our answer on accidental activation rates.

A 2020 study tested this with TV audio. The team played TV shows to smart speakers and logged every activation that happened without the wake word. Their main finding was that the devices woke often but did not appear to record constantly: "we found no evidence to support this. The devices do wake up frequently, but often for short intervals" ⁸.

The rates differed by device and by show. A Google Home Mini playing The West Wing "exhibited 0.95 average activations per hour" ⁹. Across all the shows, the Apple HomePod had 0.38 activations per hour, just behind the Invoke with Cortana and the second-generation Echo Dot ¹⁰. Those numbers come from a lab that exposed the speakers to TV audio ⁸, so a real kitchen or office may produce a different count. The devices tested were from 2019 and 2020 ¹⁰.

Accidental activation is also the center of the Google lawsuit. The plaintiffs say Google had no right to use conversations for targeted advertising when Assistant misheard speech as a hot word ¹¹. Google has denied wrongdoing ¹². Our answer on the Google Assistant lawsuit covers the claims in more detail.

Each company paused or changed its review program within months

Each company acted within months of the reports. Google told the Hamburg data protection authority that it had suspended Assistant audio reviews across all of Europe on July 10, 2019, after learning of the data leak ¹³. Apple said it had immediately suspended human grading of Siri requests after the reports, and began a review of its practices ¹⁴. Facebook said it had paused review more than a week before its August statement ⁷. Amazon's opt-out took effect on Friday, August 2, 2019 ⁵.

Google, Apple and Facebook each paused or suspended review. Amazon added an opt-out, and Microsoft changed what it told users. The pages I read do not give a count of the clips reviewed before those changes, so the scale of the practice rests mainly on the companies' own statements.

The lawsuits that followed reached settlements years later

Both lawsuits reached settlements, and the reports I read contain no court ruling on whether the practice was lawful. Apple agreed in January 2025 to pay $95 million in cash to settle a proposed class action over Siri recordings ¹⁵. In January 2026, Google agreed to pay $68 million to settle a class action that accused it of illegally recording private conversations through Assistant ¹². Google denied wrongdoing ¹², and the agreement was reported as filed. I could not open a page confirming a final court approval, so check the court docket before you rely on one.

The gap between the two is $27 million ¹⁶. A settlement amount is not a finding that either company broke the law, so read the two numbers as the price each company agreed to pay to end a claim.

Human review still exists, and Apple now makes it an opt-in

Human review did not disappear. It moved behind a setting. Apple says the Improve Siri & Dictation setting allows it to store and review a sample of your audio ¹⁷. Apple says that for people who opt in, only its own employees, under confidentiality obligations, can access that audio ¹⁸. The other half of Apple's 2019 change was that audio would no longer be kept by default. Apple said it would stop retaining audio recordings of Siri interactions unless you opted in to let it learn from them ¹⁹.

The 2019 opt-out is the only Alexa review control that the pages I read describe. In March 2025 Amazon also told owners of certain Echo models in the United States that their voice recordings would be sent to and processed in the cloud from March 28, and deleted after Alexa processes the requests ²⁰. That change is about where requests are processed. It is a separate question from who reviews clips, and the pages I read do not say it changed the review opt-out.

I could not open Google's current privacy pages for Assistant or Gemini in the time I had, so I cannot tell you today's Google review rules from a source I checked. Read the Google privacy page yourself before relying on any statement about Google.

To check any company's current position, ask three questions of its documents. Is human review described as opt-in or opt-out? Which staff can reach the audio? And is the audio kept after the request is answered? Apple's documents answer all three in the sources above. For any other company, a vague answer to one of these questions is a reason to look for a clearer one before you rely on the product for sensitive speech.

Transcripts and request history can outlast the audio

Turning off audio sharing does not remove every copy. Apple links Siri and Dictation request history, including transcripts, to a random rotating identifier rather than to your Apple Account, and says it may keep that history for up to two years ²¹. Apple also says it may review a subset of the transcripts of Siri interactions, and that the small subset it has reviewed may be kept beyond two years ²². A transcript holds the same private words as the audio, so the text can matter as much as the sound.

You can delete the history yourself. On a Mac, Apple's help says you can delete Siri and Dictation request history, both audio recordings and transcripts, if it is less than six months old ²³. The six-month limit means older history cannot be removed that way, so check the history regularly rather than once.

Other voice products keep recordings too

Apple is not the only company that keeps recordings. Samsung's US privacy policy says it collects and keeps recordings of your voice on its servers when you turn on the voice command feature and use it ²⁴. Amazon's move of Echo requests to cloud processing, covered above, follows the same pattern of sending audio to a server.

Some of these practices have been challenged in court. A federal class action filed in August 2025 alleges that Otter.ai's Otter Notebook service, by default, does not ask meeting attendees for permission to record ²⁵. An allegation is not a finding, and the report I read does not say the case has been decided.

The clearest contrast is written policy. Anthropic says that in its mobile apps it deletes the audio recording after converting speech to text, and does not keep a copy of the speech or use it for training ²⁶. A company that states, in its own help text, that it deletes audio after transcription is making a narrower and easier to check claim than one that says it may review data.

The only guarantee that no one hears you is keeping audio off the server

Every review program depends on the audio reaching a company's servers. If the recognition runs on your device and the audio never leaves it, no contractor, employee or reviewer can hear it, because there is no copy to hear. That is the design behind on-device speech recognition. Apple's own description of its server path shows the same logic: dictation sent to Apple's servers is not stored unless you opt in to Improve Siri and Dictation ²⁷.

For Mac dictation, you can check and change the setting yourself. The steps below follow the current System Settings layout; older versions of macOS used System Preferences with different pane names.

1. Open System Settings.
2. Click Privacy & Security, then Analytics & Improvements.
3. Turn off Improve Siri & Dictation, the setting that shares audio recordings ²⁸.

If you use cloud dictation at all, check whether it sends audio to a server, and whether the company keeps a copy. Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows, so its recognition runs on your computer rather than on a review server. For the full subject, see our voice privacy overview. For the controls on each platform, read our guides on Apple dictation privacy and Windows dictation privacy. Our general guide to whether voice to text is safe covers how to choose a tool, and the guide to voice data retention explains what each company keeps after you finish.

For a question you want answered directly, see whether your phone is listening to you for ads, and whether Apple contractors listened to Siri recordings. For the practical side of keeping audio off a server, see offline dictation on Mac. Whether a company trains models on your recordings is a separate question, covered in our guide on whether dictation apps train AI on your voice.