Just studied your column
+Mike Elgan, and I can confirm your theory of Google recordings being triggered by some people or sounds in the background: I move, live and work in a couple of countries, both English speaking and not English speaking ones; when looking at the history of Google recordings, I found out that the only occurrences of random recordings (which are very rare) that happened without my consent were in places where background sounds could have contained English language! Words of other languages like Persian (Farsi) or Turkish have not been able to trigger accidental listening, probably due to not containing any word similar in pronunciation to any part of "OK Google". I must add that I have setup Google app to only recognise English.
Google, or other organisations, listening to us without our consent and always (even when our phones are off) sounds a bit too much like conspiracy theories and I can not accept it because of two reasons:
1. There is no technological proof in hardware or software specifications and capabilities of our devices and applications to show that they are able to do so.
2. I can not find any clue or history of such occurrences happening that can not be explained in some other solid and not conspiracy theory like explanations.
I must add that that it really doesn't make sense to me that Google or any other organisation would be interested in investing in listening to all of everyone's random, daily conversations which takes a huge amount of processing and data communication, without any actual outcome that can't be gained with easier and less investment and resource intensive methods (like playing by the rules and just listening to what they should be listening to - like whatever we say after "OK Google").
