VOICE ASSISTANTS

If you’re concerned about what your voice assistant might be recording, you can take charge of this just like any other sort of personal data. The Google Assistant doesn’t save your audio by default, but you can optionally enable the capability at pcpro.

link/320activity. While there, you might want to click the “Auto-delete” option and set your data to be wiped after three, 18 or 36 months.

If you want to see if your Assistant devices have captured any recordings, go to myaccount.google.

com/yourdata/assistant and check the settings under Google-wide controls. Under “Audio recordings”, select “Listen to and delete activity”.

If you have an Amazon Echo device, you can use your voice to instruct it to “delete all of my voice recordings”. You’ll be warned that this might make it harder for Alexa to respond to your requests, and will then be asked to confirm the deletion. If you just want to delete anything picked up in the last ten minutes, say “Alexa, delete my voice recordings”.

If this doesn’t work, make sure deletion by voice is enabled in your account. Open the Alexa app on your phone and tap Settings | Alexa privacy. Tap “Manage your Alexa data”, then make sure the switch beside “Enable deletion by voice” is on (to the right). The row below this lets you specify how long Alexa retains recordings; by default, they’re kept until you delete them, but you can switch this to three or 18 months, or disable recording altogether.

To do the same with Cortana, log in to your Microsoft account at account.microsoft.com, then click Privacy at the top of the page. Scroll to “Voice activity” and click “View and clear voice activity”.

Finally, to delete recordings and other Siri-related data on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, open Settings | Siri & search | Siri & dictation history. Then tap “Delete Siri & dictation history”.

RIGHT You can delete your Echo data using your voice, as long as the feature is enabled