The subject of privacy, Apple and user opinions. All this is something that offers disparity of opinions in several senses and is that greater privacy can be synonymous with fewer functions for our virtual assistant but it is that privacy is, as Apple itself says, a fundamental human right.
At Apple they say they are aware of their customers' doubts about the process that involves company employees listening to Siri audio recordings as part of a Siri quality evaluation process (in English, "grading"). After this news they left in «stand-by»Any kind of listening by this team of people and they are now in the process of reviewing their practices and policies in this regard.
That is why they have proposed to make some changes to Siri
Siri is an assistant that avoids having any feasible option to violate the privacy of the users, but to improve Siri it is necessary to know some details of the users, so a fundamental part of all the assistants is to know this data. Another very different issue is what companies do with this stored data and in the case of Apple the company always defended that They are not used to create marketing profiles, much less to sell them to the highest bidder ...
If Siri is asked to read new messages, Siri simply instructs the device itself to read them aloud. The content of the messages is not transmitted to the Siri servers because it is not necessary to fulfill that request of the user.
Siri uses a random identifier (a long string of letters and numbers associated with a single device) to keep track of the data as it is processed, so that the data is not linked to the user's identity through their Apple ID or number. phone number, and we believe this process is unique among digital assistants in use today. For even more protection, after six months, the device data is unlinked even from the random identifier.
The data is used to improve the user experience when using Siri. For example, when Siri detects an unusual name, it can use the names in Contacts to ensure it is correctly recognized, and it also uses this information to learn and use it later. On privacy and everything that has happened so far, the firm itself apologizes for not being up to par and prepare changes for the next versions of your software. The changes they want to make for Siri are:
- First of all, by definition, they will no longer store audio recordings of interactions with Siri. They will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help improve Siri
- Second, users will be able to enable the option to help improve Siri by learning from audio samples of their requests. From Apple they hope that people accept these conditions to improve the functions of the assistant. People who decide to actively participate by allowing "to be heard" may withdraw at any time
- Third, if a user chooses to enable the Help Enhance Siri option, only Apple employees will be able to hear the audio samples of interactions with Siri. All recordings that are interpreted as an error in Siri activation will be deleted.
We continue to think that Apple and any company need user data in order to improve services, this is common in all companies. What no longer seems so normal to us is that this data can be sold to third companies to obtain other benefits that are really harmful to privacy. In any case, it is difficult to maintain a red line that separates all the data of our privacy with the companies and is that in the world of internet, social networks, virtual assistants and others, it is difficult to "stay out of danger" so that our data or Conversations do not end up in the wrong hands, although the commitment to maintain privacy is something that cannot fail in large multinationals.