I was surprised to learn this week that Apple will stop the default recording and storing of Siri conversations.
Sorry, what? Apple’s doing that?
Yep, about 300 of Apple’s European contractors had access to recorded Siri conversations as part of a project to improve Siri’s artificial intelligence.
This process is called “grading”, where humans listen to recorded Siri conversations to identify, report, and correct errors, such as Siri responding when the user didn’t intend to wake her.
As someone who is relatively relaxed about their personal data privacy (we’ve got an Alexa and I’ve never performed a personal data privacy audit, but I do have a paid password manager and two-factor authentication set up where possible), this spooked me.
Perhaps naively, I thought Siri’s artificial intelligence was trained on a small subset of opt-in users, and didn’t realise recording my conversations with Siri were recorded by default.
Apple has now suspended default recording and storing of Siri conversations, and I think it’s response to the criticism has been pretty clear, but this learning has encouraged me to audit my personal data privacy settings across the rest of my digital life.
Do you have any tips or tricks for protecting your data online?