Google Home Mini secretly recorded everything its owner said

It was listening to its user even when it shouldn't have been

Aatif Sulleyman

Wednesday 11 October 2017 10:36 BST

Google hardware products are displayed during a launch event in San Francisco, California, U.S. October 4, 2017 (REUTERS/Stephen Lam)

Google’s new Home Mini voice assistant has been spying on some of its users, due to a “phantom” issue.

The device is designed to respond to your questions, but only after you say “Okay Google” or “Hey Google”, or tap and hold a touch panel on it.

However, an early release model has been found to be recording its owner all the time, without him realising.

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

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1/1111 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

Easter Eggs

There are a lot of Easter Eggs hidden in Chrome, and more and more are discovered each year. One of our favourites is the dinosaur game. The next time you fail to connect to the internet on Chrome, tap the spacebar. It’s also worth Googling “barrel roll”, “zerg rush”, “super mario bros” (and clicking the question mark graphic), “festivus”, “recursion”, “askew” and “atari breakout” (and then clicking Images).

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

Pin tabs

If you tend to browse with a lot of tabs open at once, you can clear up the clutter by pinning the ones you’re least likely to close. Right-click them and select Pin Tab. They’ll automatically shrink and slide left.

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

Save battery

You can save some battery life by sacrificing performance. In Settings, scroll down to the System section and uncheck the box reading Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed. We wouldn’t recommend having this feature enabled all the time, but it could come in handy if you’re nowhere near a charger.

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Browse faster

There are loads of Chrome Extensions available, but one of the most useful is Google’s Data Saver. It compresses the pages you visit to reduce data usage and speed up loading times.

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

Make multiple profiles

If you use multiple Google accounts, for work and for personal use, for instance, you can keep your bookmarks and browsing history for each account separate by creating individual profiles. Go to Settings, Manage People and Add Person. This is also handy for when you lend your computer to a friend, and you don’t want them to have access to your internet history.

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

Downloads

Many users would prefer it if Chrome downloaded files straight to the desktop, but by default it sends them to your Downloads folder. You can change this by going to Settings, opening the Show Advanced Settings menu, clicking Downloads and choosing your preferred destination.

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Extra info

To see cookies and permissions for every site you visit, click the View Site Information symbol on the left-hand edge of the omnibar. It will also let you quickly control things like Popup and Location settings.

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

Task manager

You can quickly find out which pages are using up the most memory and slowing down your browsing experience by opening the burger menu, going down to More Tools and opening the Chrome Task Manager.

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

Calculator

When you’re online and need to do a quick sum, you don’t have to hunt down your computer calculator or whip out your phone. Just type it into the Chrome omnibar and hit Enter.

11 hidden Google Chrome features you didn't know existed

Startup

If there’s a certain set of pages you always open when you turn your computer on, you can get Chrome to open them automatically when you launch the browser. In Settings, click Set Pages in the On Startup section, and choose the ones you want.

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Search Gmail from omnibar

You can search your gmail inbox directly from the omnibar by going to Settings, Manage Search Engines, scrolling to the bottom and pasting https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/#apps/%s into the box on the right-hand side.

Android Police’s Artem Russakovskii, who received a Google Home Mini at the company’s recent Pixel launch event and kept it in his bathroom, reported the extremely serious issue to Google last week.

“It was waking up thousands of times a day, recording, then sending those recordings to Google,” he said. “All of this was done quietly, with only the four lights on the unit I wasn't looking at flashing on and then off.”

Google was quick to respond to the report, sending an engineer to examine the unit right away, and admitting that there was a major problem with it. It also revealed that this wasn’t a unique case.

The company said in a statement: “The Google Home team is aware of an issue impacting a small number of Google Home Mini devices that could cause the touch control mechanism to behave incorrectly. We immediately rolled out a software update on October 7 to mitigate the issue.”

Google told Android Police that the Home Mini’s touch panel had been registering “phantom” touches, which caused it to keep activating and recording everything going on around it.

The software update rolled out by the company fixes the issue by instructing all Home Minis to ignore the touch functionality.

“We take user privacy very seriously,” it added. “We've removed any activity/queries that were created by long pressing the top of a Google Home Mini between October 4 and October 7, when the software update was rolled out.

“That information will no longer be listed on your My Activity page”

My Activity is an extremely intriguing and slightly concerning page that shows everything Google knows about you.

The information has been collected from all of Google's products, including Chrome, Android and Maps, and you can sort through it and delete things you don't want the company to remember.

The Home Mini, a miniature version of Google Home, the company’s smart voice assistant, will come out on 19 October, costing £49.

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