Apple apologizes for letting contractors eavesdrop on Siri’s sex recordings
Apple
apologizes for letting contractors eavesdrop on Siri’s sex recordings
Sorry we’ve been eavesdropping on your sex life.
Apple on Wednesday apologized to its users
for employing third-party contractors to listen to audio recordings picked up
by its Siri voice assistant, including when the voice assistant program was
accidentally triggered by muffled background noise.
The practice — in which Apple had contractors
listened to recordings to grade Siri’s performance — made waves after a
whistleblower said the voice assistant routinely
recorded people having sex, as well as making drug deals and
discussing confidential medical information.
“We realize we haven’t been fully living up
to our high ideals, and for that we apologize,” Apple said Wednesday.
Apple
suspended the recordings after the whistleblower, a former
Apple contractor, exposed Apple’s eavesdropping practice to
The Guardian newspaper in June.
“The sound of a zip, Siri often hears as a
trigger,” the contractor said.
Sometimes, “you can definitely hear a doctor
and patient, talking about the medical history of the patient. Or you’d hear
someone, maybe with car engine background noise – you can’t say definitely, but
it’s a drug deal … you can definitely hear it happening. And you’d hear, like,
people engaging in sexual acts that are accidentally recorded on the pod or the
watch,” the Guardian reported.
The iPhone maker says it will start the Siri
grading program up again under new guidelines that will allow users to opt in
to the program. It will not keep Siri audio recordings for grading Siri without
users’ permission, it said.
Apple will also only allow its own employees
to review the audio recordings — not third-party contractors. It also pledged to
work to delete “any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger
of Siri.”
“We hope that many people will choose to help
Siri get better, knowing that Apple respects their data and has strong privacy
controls in place,” the company said. “Those who choose to participate will be
able to opt out at any time.”
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