Hey Google, do you really record everything I say? Yes.

Google says it only records interactions with connected devices like the Google Home speaker when we use the "wake word," of "Hey, Google," or "OK, Google."

But when using many of the Google smartphone apps with a microphone for voice search, or even Google on the desktop with voice commands, it can actually record every word you say to it—whether you use the wake word or not.

The fine print is that you have to click on the microphone in the apps to communicate with Google. (For queries like "Hey, Google, find Italian restaurants near me.") Once you do that, Google will start transcribing you, word for word, and storing your commands, in text and audio, as U.S. TODAY discovered in tests this week.

This is similar to Google's monitoring of our keystrokes. The search giant takes note of every letter and word typed into the Google Chrome browser, and every website visited, unless you use "Incognito Mode" instead. (Remember, though, incognito doesn't mean invisible.)

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-01-hey-google.html

Germany's Middle Eastern Criminal Clans

January 4, 2020 at 5:00 am

"For decades, police turned a blind eye to extended criminal families, in part to avoid being accused of racial discrimination. This has made the present-day challenge all the more difficult as clan structures have solidified, parallel societies have formed, and the enemy has grown." — Deutsche Welle, February 3, 2019.

"There are now half a million people across Germany who belong to a clan…. Clans behave in their German surroundings as if they were tribes in the desert. Everything outside the clan is enemy territory and available for plunder". — Ralph Ghadban, a Lebanese-German political scientist and a leading expert on clans in Germany; The German Times, October 2019.

"It is known that the Osmanen Germania gang has received financial assistance from Turkey's ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party. The gang has essentially functioned as [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan's armed wing in Germany." — Sebastian Fiedler, head of the Association of German Criminal Investigators.

The clans see the state as, "an object of ridicule, a target for exploitation" — Falko Liecke, Neukölln's deputy district mayor and district councilor for youth and health. The German Times, October 2019.

n a recently aired documentary by German broadcaster ARD, about Germany's Middle Eastern criminal family gangs – or clans, as they are called in Germany – the head of Germany's Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) Holger Münch, said "In about one-third of proceedings, suspects also included immigrants — and that means that we need to keep a very close eye on this phenomenon".

Münch seems to have been referring to the fact that migrants who arrived in Germany from Syria, Iraq and other countries during the migrant crisis in 2015-16 are now starting to compete with Germany's long-established criminal family gangs whose original founders arrived in Germany from Lebanon in the late 1970s during Lebanon's civil war.

German authorities fear that this competition might lead to even more violence: Some of the newcomers have "combat experience" from living in war zones, as police chief of the city of Essen, Frank Richter, told ARD. "Of course," he added, "this would be a very, very different situation from what we have at the moment".

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15300/germany-middle-eastern-criminal-clans#.XhBnGxIyPnA.twitter