Undoubtedly in the wake of privacy concerns and all the negative press surrounding smart devices listening in on conversations—ergo flesh and bone employees as well—Apple has announced changes to Siri’s Privacy Policy.
Apple states, “Siri has been engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning. We focus on doing as much on
Making sure they are as clear as possible with what they do with this data, they go on to say, “When we store Siri data on our servers, we don’t use it to build a marketing profile and we never sell it to anyone. We use Siri data only to improve Siri, and we are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private.”
Whether you believe their efforts have been altruistic or not, Apple is certainly aware of consumer concerns and admits that they haven’t been doing a very good job of living up to their own ideals. So, they have announced the following changes:
- First, by default, we will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions. We will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help Siri improve.
- Second, users will be able to opt in to help Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests. 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. Those who choose to participate will be able toopt out at any time. - Third, when customers
opt in , only Apple employees will be allowed to listen to audio samples of the Siri interactions. Our team will work to delete any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri.
We’d love to hear from you on this subject. What are your thoughts and concerns with Siri and Apple’s use of the data they collect? Are you confident they will hold up their end of the
I love my Apple hardware, but I am blatantly aware that they are very much a shareholder profit driven corporation that charge the highest prices possible. This profit driven mind set always comes first despite diligent effort to portray to customers that the customer is #1.
All such effort is fake news.
No I don’t trust Apple to always do what is right. They always do what is good for their wallets.
Precisely. All protestations to the contrary by Apple are, to put it politely (if not quite precisely) fertilizer.
I trust Apple.
This is a welcome change. I will opt in because Siri often makes terrible errors and I want Apple to have content they can use to refine the voice recognition.
Little bit creepy… :-)
“HELLO. THIS IS BIG BROTHER. WE CAN SEE, HEAR, AND EVEN SMELL EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN YOUR HOME. HAVE A NICE DAY.”
If your convenience (or laziness) is more important than your privacy, you don’t deserve privacy. If you consent, you have just given away the last of your Fourth Amendment rights. Not that the Supreme Court has left you much, but they did leave the protections for what goes on in the home, absent a court order. If you consent, then you have no privacy even there.