Apple Suspends Program That Lets Employees Listen to Siri Recordings for Quality Control, Opt Out Option Coming
Apple is suspending a Siri program that allows employees to listen to Siri recordings for quality control purposes, reports TechCrunch.
Apple is going to review the process that's currently used, where workers listen to anonymized Siri recordings to determine whether Siri is hearing questions correctly or being activated accidentally.
Apple in the future also plans to release a software update that will let Siri users opt out of having their Siri queries included in this evaluation process, called grading.
"We are committed to delivering a great Siri experience while protecting user privacy," Apple said in a statement to TechCrunch. "While we conduct a thorough review, we are suspending Siri grading globally. Additionally, as part of a future software update, users will have the ability to choose to participate in grading."
The decision to suspend the program and offer an opt-out option comes following a report from The Guardian that shared details gleaned from one of the contractors working on evaluating Siri queries.
The employee expressed concern with Apple's lack of disclosure about the human oversight and said that contractors who work on the program have overhead confidential medical information, drug deals, recordings of couples having sex, and other private details from accidental Siri activations.
When The Guardian report came out, Apple confirmed that a small number of anonymized Siri requests are analyzed for the purpose of improving Siri and dictation. While Apple anonymizes Siri data that's evaluated for quality control and Siri improvement, its current privacy policy and security documents do not explicitly mention human oversight.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Top Rated Comments
When I read their policies (after their new policy pages came out), I took it to mean that they reviewed them. I don’t understand the shock behind this. How else are they meant to be improved if they aren’t listened to by other people? I’m assuming the contact info is only used when you say “Hey Siri, call my dad”. If it takes that stuff constantly no matter what, then that’s a bit of a concern.
It’s good they’re letting people opt out of it. That should’ve been there from day one