It was first rumored that Amazon’s Alexa could hear some portion of your conversations. Soon Google Assistant also joined the likes of Alexa and now it is Siri. Your conversations are not secure around these voice assistants. Seems like you have to completely shut them off for satisfaction that no one else is hearing what you are talking about.
In The Guardians’ recent report, Apple agreed that Siri listens to some of the conversations with an aim to use it for quality control. Apple contractors listen to your conversation just to know whether the voice assistant was triggered by mistake or not. Also, monitoring user’s conversations allow Apple contractors to know whether Siri’s response was appropriate or not.
Apple confirmed that reviewers only listen to about 1% of the total interactions with Siri in a day. These recordings are not related to any Apple ID, the company claims. This is done to improve Siri’s responses and dictation. These conversations are worked in a secret and secure facility and the reviewers are required to adhere to the strict confidentiality requirements set by Apple.
The 1% of all Siri interactions could be very large since a lot of times, Siri is triggered accidentally inside the pocket and the user doesn’t even know that their conversation is being recorded. An Apple insider reveals that some business deals, criminal deals, and doctor-patient talks have also been recorded.
Siri is activated when you long-press the home button on iPhone 8 and previous models or when you say “Hello Siri”. People tend to link Siri with iPhones and Macbooks only but it is active on HomePod and Apple Watch as well. The Apple contractor said that the staff is only asked to report accidental triggers and not the conversation that takes place. He ensured that the information is never misused however, accidental triggers sometimes reveal the name, address, and other sensitive information.
Alexa and Google Assistant allow the users to turn off microphone recordings. However, they can still use the voice assistant whenever needed. One the other hand, Apple says either disable Siri entirely or not at all.
