Earlier this year, the Guardian published a report which revealed that Apple was secretly paying human contractors to listen to recordings of customers talking to its Siri digital assistant in order to improve the service. Siri is Apple’s voice-controlled personal assistant and it uses speech recognition and natural language processing technologies to process voice commands that operate the mobile device and its apps.
Although not explicitly disclosed in consumer-facing privacy documentation, it was discovered that a small proportion of Siri recordings were being passed onto Apple’s contractors around the world so that they could grade the responses based on various factors including whether the activation of Siri was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was within the range of what Siri could expect to assist with, and whether Siri’s response to the query was appropriate. As part of their job of providing quality control, Apple’s contractors were regularly privy to private material including confidential medical information, crimes being committed and couples having sexual intercourse.
In the aftermath of that report, Apple issued a formal apology for its privacy practices, noting its failure to “fully live up to its high ideals”. In its statement, Apple announced that it would suspend the grading program along with other changes including the discontinued retention of audio recordings of Siri interactions in favour of computer-generated transcripts; the option for users to opt into the use of audio samples of their requests, and if opted in, the deletion of any inadvertent triggers of the Siri assistant. However, Apple was just one of several major tech companies that were caught using paid human contractors to review recordings from its digital assistant.
Who else is listening in?
This story is from the December 2019/January 2020 edition of Leadership.
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This story is from the December 2019/January 2020 edition of Leadership.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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