Apple Workers May Be Listening to Your Siri Conversations

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2019/07/29/apple-workers-may-be-listening-to-your-siri-conversations/

Apple has increasingly used its stance on privacy as a selling point, but The Guardian has revealed that, like Amazon, Apple lets contractors listen in on conversations held while Siri is active. The audio may be difficult or impossible to trace back to the individuals who are speaking, but Apple should still find a better way to improve Siri.

Well, they’re not doing anything to fix her when I tell her she’s being stupid!

3 Likes

I’d like to see all the voice assistant companies doing just this—trying to establish how accurate the assistant was by analyzing the user’s subsequent commands or exclamations (or obscenities). Perhaps they already are behind the scenes, but Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant could still be apologetic when they screw up and the user yells at them.

I often expect a response when I yell at her, but I’ve never gotten one.

Diane

I’m sure that a contractor’s ears may be burning from time to time when I use Siri, especially on my Watch 3. (Unlike iPhone and my Macs, Watch begs for voice control.) But now that I know it could in fact be monitored, I have a dilemma: do I blow off the bit of pent up energy caused by a boneheaded Siri response, or do I now have to take moral injury into consideration?

One thing that could help is for Apple (and the other voice assistant companies) to tell their users to say something like “Siri that is stupid” and only then would the previous dialog be examined. This would go some ways to addressing the privacy concerns, while giving the quality folks better cues to find things that need fixing.