Apple wants to evaluate “Siri”-recordings again

14. October 2019

Apple wants to evaluate Siri-recordings again in the future. After it became public that Apple automatically saved the audio recordings of Siri entries and had some of them evaluated by employees of external companies, the company stopped this procedure. Although Apple stated that only less than 0.2 % of the queries were actually evaluated, the system received around 10 billion queries per month (as of 2018).

In the future, audio recordings from the Siri language assistant will be stored and evaluated again. This time, however, only after the user has consented. This procedure will be tested with the latest beta versions of the Apple IOS software for iPhone and iPad.

Apple itself hopes that many users will agree and thus contribute to the improvement of Siri. A later opt-out is possible at any time, but for each device individually. In addition, only apple’s own employees, who are – according to Apple -subject to strict confidentiality obligations ,will evaluate the recordings. Recordings that have been generated by an unintentional activation of Siri will be completely deleted.

In addition, a delete function for Siri-recordings is to be introduced. Users can then choose in their settings to delete all data recorded by Siri. If this deletion is requested within 24 hours of a Siri request, the respective recordings and transcripts will not be released for evaluation.

However, even if the user does not opt-in to the evaluation of his Siri recordings, a computer-generated transcript will continue to be created and kept by Apple for a certain period of time. Although these transcripts are to be anonymized and linked to a random ID, they still could be evaluated according to Apple.

Category: General
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