Apple apologizes and promises to disable default Siri records

Apple said Wednesday that keeping voice recordings of orders placed by users with its Siri personal assistant would not be enabled by default, and would also limit human review of records collected only on its employees, rather than on sub-records. -traitants.

The changes come after the US tech giant stopped a program this month called Siri Patch, in which humans listened to users' audio recordings to determine if the assistant had responded appropriately to such requests. only read unread messages or Calendar Dates to come.

Apple suspended the program after the Guardian announced that subcontractors working for Apple regularly listened to classified information, drug cases and even couples' voices during sex.

Increased public and political scrutiny of data privacy practices has demanded greater transparency from Silicon Valley companies, with Google announcing the temporary suspension of audio-visual revisions from its Google assistant for all intents and purposes in all languages ​​after the leak of audio data from the Netherlands.

Apple has strengthened its privacy practices to differentiate itself from competitors and has taken action since the launch of Siri in 2011 to limit data collection. The company indicates that voice recordings are deleted after a certain time and that the user's identity is identified by a random number and does not send any data, such as: unread messages or appointments you schedule users, to Apple servers.

But Apple was listening to users' voice recordings to improve service, a process that researchers say is able to halve voice recognition error rates.

According to Apple, the number of audited sound recordings was low (less than 0.2% of the total number of requests), but users had no way of unsubscribing from the voice conservation and the Examination by humans, with the exception of Siri's judgment.

Today, Apple is excused for the preservation of its recordings by stating: "As a result of our review, we recognize that we have not fully adhered to our ideals and we apologize ". She noted that she had stopped the program (fix Siri), but this one will come back with the launch of the next version of the iOS system, but with three changes.

The company explained that the first change stipulated that the preservation of sound recordings would not be activated by default, as it would continue to use computer generated texts to improve Siri. Secondly, users wishing to help the company improve Siri will be able to activate the control of audio recordings, with the possibility to disable it at any time.

The third change, Apple confirmed that only Apple employees would hear audio recordings of users participating in the program. The company team will also delete records identified as having been retrieved in error.