As voice-activated digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon Alexa become more and more common, manufacturers usually let consumers choose when they should be listening.

But that’s not always the case for newer Android phones, which continue to passively listen for your voice even after a user disables the feature in the device’s settings.

In a video posted to Twitter, software engineer Zach Leatherman showed that even when his Android phone’s voice activation feature is disabled, the device will continue to listen for “OK Google” voice commands, which prompts an Android device to listen for further voice commands as long as its notifications panel is open. Leatherman said he discovered the quirk while scrolling through notifications on his Google Pixel while listening to a keynote speech from Google’s I/O conference.

“When the keynote speaker started to demo a new feature with the Google Assistant, he said ‘OK Google’ and it triggered [my] Android’s voice training prompt, indicating that it had been listening for the ‘Ok Google’ keywords even though I had disabled that feature,” Leatherman told Vocativ.

In addition to the Pixel, Vocativ was able to reproduce the results of Leatherman’s test in multiple Android devices with default settings, including a Nexus 5X and an older Motorola Droid Mini running an outdated version of Google’s operating system.

The reason has to do with the Google app, which is installed by default on most non-Samsung Android devices. The “OK Google” voice command feature is part of the Google app, and is enabled by default in devices running more recent versions of the Android operating system.

But because the Google app is now baked into many of the Android operating system’s core functions, some actions, like sliding down the notifications panel or tapping the Google search bar on the home screen, automatically open the app in the background. The Google app then activates the microphone, even if the “always listening” feature has been turned off.

Additionally, on some devices tested by Vocativ, the disabled “OK Google” prompt was still recognized when spoken with Android’s homescreen or app drawer open.

It’s unclear whether the quirk is an oversight or an intentional part of the operating system’s design. The company did not respond to Vocativ’s request for comment at press time…….more here