Can you expand on what information is required to use this feature? I assume you can create a new account with little to no information (or fake information) and use it.
What about it? Not sure about Canada, but in the US, at least, they definitely can't record it without at least one party knowing, and the state-by-state laws on that point are varied enough that if you start recording one of your conversations, google voice warns both sides of the conversation.
Additionally: "Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content that you or your callers upload, transmit or store in your Google Voice account. We will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service."
http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlevoice/legal-notices.html
Come to think of it, does anyone know of where google makes money here? Is it just international calls? Even the voice transcription training probably isn't that lucrative, because you have to have users click on a message and say "Donate this voicemail" for it to be used as training data.
Thanks for clarifying, it's good to know that they are not supposed to access the content of voice calls. Maybe it's simply a loss-leader to get people jumping onto the google wagon with the rest of their services.
Google doesn't make money on Google Voice. It serves the same purpose as GOOG-411 served. To receive and process a large number of voice samples (from voicemails) to improve their voice search products. There's probably some other pie-in-the-sky ideas for Google Voice, but that's the only one I know of.
Do you have any basis for that? See the second and third paragraphs in the comment you're responding to. By my reading, they can't use those unless you "donate" the voicemails explicitly, which I doubt anyone does (at least I've never bothered to, even for the more ridiculously transcribed ones).
