Apple and Google temporarily suspend customer registration monitoring

Apple and Google have temporarily prevented their employees from listening to audio recordings picked up by smart speakers and virtual badistants.

The report was published after an article in the Guardian newspaper that subcontractors working for Apple had listened to the company's customers while they had bad and discussed private medical information.

Apple's "Seri" answering service and other services may erroneously function after capturing any sounds that may be heard in error, as if they were service activation commands.

Apple said this decision would affect users around the world.

Google stopped this service in the EU on July 10, but recently announced it.

Amazon, which employs people to listen to certain customer records, has not commented on this.

Technology companies use personnel to clbadify phonograms to improve the performance and accuracy of virtual badistants in processing requests and to take steps to make the sound source unknown.

For example, Google clogs the records of its customers before listening to them to hide the voice of the user.

However, few people were aware of this practice until Bloomberg News reported back earlier this year.

"We are committed to providing excellent service to Siri while protecting the privacy of the user," Apple said in a press release.

"We are going to suspend the process of clbadifying the recordings we use with Siri around the world,

"The votes of future users will not be included in the evaluation process unless the user chooses to subscribe to this service," the company added.

Johannes Caspar, Data Protection Commissioner in Hamburg (Germany), investigates the use of Google's voice tagging service. The latter cooperates in the investigation.

"From the point of view of security and confidentiality, the contractors who clbadify the recordings are" at risk ", the regulator said in a press release.

"The use of speech support systems must be transparent for users to approve."

Google said that it had already stopped removing the phonograms and that it would last at least three months.

The company spokeswoman said Google was "in touch" with the Hamburg commissioner.

"We do not link audio tracks to user accounts during the review process, and we control about 0.2% of all clips."

The BBC had asked Amazon if it was also considering suspending monitoring of customer registrations.

In June, Alexa, the executive of Google's virtual help system, said that a "very small portion of 1%" of audio recordings was being listened to.

But he acknowledged that the general conditions of society should be clearer on the issue.