Just a month ago, an employee at a company subcontracted by Apple denounced unethical practices by Tim Cook's company in relation to its voice assistant .
The employee, who was analysing some of the recordings provided by Siri, recounted “countless cases of recordings of private discussions between doctors and patients, apparently criminal dealings, sexual encounters, etc.” These recordings were accompanied by user data, something that clashes completely with the values of the company , which considers privacy “a fundamental human right.”
Now, the tech giant is acknowledging its mistake : "We have come to the conclusion that we have not fully lived up to our high ideals and we apologize for that," it said in a statement .
"We know that customers have had concerns following recent reports about people listening armenia phone number to Siri audio recordings as part of our Siri quality assessment process. In response to their concerns, we immediately stopped human review of Siri requests and have begun a deep review of our practices and policies," the company said.
However, the company reminds that "in order to accurately perform custom tasks", Siri needs to collect and store "some data from the user's device". For this reason, it hopes to resume the evaluation program in the fall , "when software updates are available to users", and after having made some changes:
– The company will no longer retain audio recordings of interactions with Siri and will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help improve the voice assistant.
– Users will be able to opt in to help improve Siri by learning from audio samples of their requests. Apple hopes that many people “will choose to help improve Siri knowing that Apple respects their data and has strict privacy controls in place. People who choose to participate can opt out at any time.”
– If a user chooses to enable the option to help improve Siri, only Apple employees will be able to listen to audio samples of interactions, and recordings where it is determined that there was no intent to activate the assistant will be deleted.
In any case, the company insists that Siri “uses a random identifier (a long string of letters and numbers associated with a single device) to track data as it is processed, so that the data is not linked to a user’s identity via their Apple ID or phone number,” a process that Apple says is “unique among digital assistants currently in use.”