Last week, The Guardian revealed that Apple uses human contractors to review Siri recordings — and that the contractors often end up hearing everything from drug deals to sexual encounters as a result.
Apple said Friday that it has suspended the use of those contractors while it reviews the process. It will allow users to opt out of having their Siri discussions being reviewed by a human contractor in the future. That ability will come in a future software update.
In an email to The Washington Post, an Apple spokesperson says that Apple was committed to user privacy. Following Apple’s announcement, Google said it was also going to temporarily suspend the use of humans to review “OK Google” voice assistant recordings. We’ve reached out to both Google and Apple for more details and will update this story if we hear back.
The human contractors reviewed conversations with Siri in order to improve the virtual assistant. Contractors would listen to recordings when Siri was triggered but did not provide an answer in order to determine if she should have been able to in that instance.
The goal behind the human listeners was to better understand situations where Siri might be failing so that she could be improved going forward. They would listen to a recording, determine if the user meant to activate Siri, and grade her response (or lack thereof).
That human element, however, wasn’t made clear to users.
A whistleblower who worked as a Siri reviewer told The Guardian that the contractors would often be able to hear things like sensitive medical information, and that recordings were accompanied by user data showing users’ location and some personal details.
Less than 1% of daily Siri activations were sent to human contractors for evaluation.
“User requests are not associated with the user’s Apple ID. Siri responses are analyzed in secure facilities and all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements,” Apple said in a statement to The Guardian when the issue was originally revealed.
Apple isn’t the first company to run into this issue. Earlier this year, Amazon came under fire for similar issues with its personal assistant, Alexa. Much like Apple, Amazon uses humans to analyze recordings of Alexa’s answers. It also retains text data of requests, even when a user deletes a recording.
Amazon now offers an option within Alexa’s settings where customers can opt out of their data being used to improve the service.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.