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Apple contractors listened to 1k Siri recordings per shift: former employee

198 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

acd 7y ago
Does it clearly say record so when using Siri in regards to GDPR? Whenever you call a call center they usually says this call may be recorded. Hidden wire tapping of conversations which some might legal wrangle to it is not legal in many countries. Aldo transfer of personal records to third parties is not legal. If someone speaks “I like political party x” and that is recorded that might be a registration of political opinion.
Havoc 7y ago
And this is why I've got gear on the way to build a DIY replacement with mycroft & field array microphone & a raspberry. I'll probably throw a blog post on hn despite not being true show hn
- esotericn 7y ago
  I'm looking forward to it!
- Zenst 7y ago
  Look forward to that, something on my list of things to do. Though for the mic array, I want to try out contact microphones, make a whole house far-field array that way, might work, might not, but it will certainly be educational. One aspect I've worked out is how to make a balanced contact mic using two piezo discs stuck back to back with a rigid layer in between acting as the pickup. Trick is that as the two discs are back to back, they effectively produce a balanced signal and that alone helps eliminate so much of the static/noise that contact mics due to impedance are susceptible too.
  - Havoc 7y ago
    Well it's currently shipping so I'm doing this for better or worse Mic array...pretty sure the tech I ordered (respeaker 6 mic) is towards the top end of DIY mic arrays so hopeful that I'll get good real life results. Also very keen to work out whether I can use tensorflow to filter out baseline background noise BEFORE feeding the audio stream into mycroft. Planning on launching a new blog to document my experiments and failures on this ( https://kaizen.today https://kaizen.today - not yet live cause still waiting for said tech...but SEO links and all that)
    - MapleWalnut 7y ago
      I've used the same mic array and the provided software isn't great. In fact it's terrible, but ODAS[0] is amazing. It's super accurate, can track/isolate multiple audio sources, and has a web ui to visualize it. They also have config specifically to handle the respeaker and raspberry pi. [0]: https://github.com/introlab/odas https://github.com/introlab/odas
      - Havoc 7y ago
        Amazing! Thanks for the helpful link
    - Zenst 7y ago
      Yes, they have MEMS, looked at those a while back, was after something that I could add external mics as I need in my case and kinda ended up looking for a 5 mic input solution. Which last I looked entailed an external music input via USB unless I made something from scratch (would like to do that though wanted to work on the software and viability aspect of what I had in mind). But as that is one of my to do projects, I'll look into it again when time and resources prevail as things move fast in tech and might be something more suitable for my needs by the time I get around to this. https://www.matrix.one/products/voice https://www.matrix.one/products/voice Just read about that today, no idea if better than the respeaker option - software/support/features..etc, but may be worth having a look in too.
      - Havoc 7y ago
- xigency 7y ago
  Doing offline voice recognition is pretty challenging on Raspberry Pi since it is relatively underpowered. Using pocketSphinx with RPi 3, it takes 2-3x realtime to do recognition, and the accuracy is underwhelming. Most DIY voice assistants handle voice recognition and speech synthesis with online services, defeating the privacy purpose. If you would like to really take on Siri and Alexa, I would recommend using beefier hardware.
  - perfmode 7y ago
    anyone aware of low-power ASICs available to DIY to perform inference using pre-trained models?
    - dodobirdlord 7y ago
      Yup, Google's Coral and NVIDIA's Jetson Nano. https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/ https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/ https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-kit?nvid=nv-int-mn-78462 https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-...
    - Havoc 7y ago
      Don't think you need that much power for inference. Plus at siri levels you can probably push it to cloud if need be
  - Havoc 7y ago
    >Doing offline voice recognition is pretty challenging on Raspberry Pi Mycroft is hooked into some sort of mozilla cloud thing (deepspeech) I gather. So plan is to roll a baseline and then see if I can local host a deep speech server >I would recommend using beefier hardware Plan is to ultimately deploy a gpu accelerated tensorflow integration so beefiness of hardware has been considered. >RPi 3 4 cause true gigabit and usb 3
robbrown451 7y ago
I wouldn't see the problem with it if they were open about it and allowed opting in and out. I use Android phones, and there are many times I wish there was a human listening, usually when I am cursing at the OK Google lady for being so stupid. (yesterday: "no you idiot, I'm not going to tap one of the options for gas stations, isn't it f*ing obvious I'm driving a car??!!!")
- msbarnett 7y ago
  > I use Android phones, and there are many times I wish there was a human listening Google does the exact same thing to train the “OK Google” functionality. Apple wasn’t mechanical turk-ing Siri, this is about humans tagging prerecorded data for ML training datasets.
  - robbrown451 7y ago
    Yes I wasn't suggesting that Apple or Google were having humans actually process the requests real time. My wish that they were listening would be satisfied if, months later, someone heard my frustrated response and there was a way they could register that in the ML training set or otherwise register that so that product designers could see it. (in the example above, it is more of a product design issue than a ML issue) That's actually what I am hoping for -- I'm not trying to make a minimum wage employee miserable, I would like the actual software to get smarter. (and maybe make the AI Google Lady a bit unhappy, if that is possible)
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      It seems to me the limitations with assistants aren't voice recognition but NLP. If I have to craft my query for a machine then you've failed to make a 'natural language' input.
      - robbrown451 7y ago
        I agree (mostly) but not sure how that applies to my comment. Yes my major frustrations with it is that it isn't able to form a helpful response, not that it gets the actual words wrong. And in the case above, it goes beyond that. Designers of the product (Google maps) have it present onscreen options you need to click, in response to a spoken request (e.g. "find gas stations on my route") that is likely to be by a person who is driving and should not have to look at a screen. I would argue that that is not just non-helpful, but irresponsible and unsafe. But I guess you are right, in that if they have the transcripts, they don't need to actually listen to recordings. Then again they might need to listen to recordings if they are trying to gauge user frustration.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cmdshiftf4 7y ago
Someday the general populace may come to recognize the true cost of demanding the "convenience" of smart voice assistants, automated photo-tagging, relevant product suggestions, etc. and maybe then we'll see outrage. Or we're already at that point, and the general populace has chosen perceived convenience above all else?
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  The cost will be enormous. But I expect the outrage will be very similar to the outrage we see now towards industrialism: Yes, the costs are devastating, and a small minority perceive that devastation acutely (including me). But the vast majority of people think: oh well, would you rather be starving on a farm in the dustbowl? So I don’t expect any kind of major political unrest regarding privacy ever. Privacy Within Society was a blip in history. After that it was either/or and privacy was a thing you had to construct through separation.
  - briandear 7y ago
    Was anyone’s privacy actually violated? The voices were anonymized and not tied to an identity or device. It’s like someone leaked random paragraphs of random emails with identifiers pulled out.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  I see nothing wrong with smart voice assistants etc. I only see a problem with it all controlled by few corporations and all the proprietary algorithms underneath closed up.. They know all about us and we almost nothing about them. .. or in a dystopian future, even "they" then do not know how all the proprietary libaries, training data and algorithms etc. of all the smart homes and self driving cars and autonomous killer robots anymore, and then some conflicting virus gets out of controll and ... Booom.
- robbrown451 7y ago
  Someone needs to clarify what those costs actually are. Some people don't value privacy as much as others, and they aren't "wrong", they just have different values and priorities. Personally, I am quite fine having my smart voice assistant send my recordings to humans somewhere to evaluate to train the database. In fact I always assumed they were doing that.
Fickry 7y ago
Wait. Deja vu. Couple months ago I joke with my friend about if apple employee listening to siri users and using google search for send back information to they users.
sschueller 7y ago
How long until these recordings start leaking to the public because of a contractor not being up to security requirements or some employees taping recordings?
- Tagbert 7y ago
  I work for a company where we have contractors at the customer service centers. This is pretty standard for customer service workers. They handle reservations over the phone and customer support. The centers where they work are very locked down. They deal with customer names and credit cards as part of their jobs. They go through background checks. (It can be hard to get enough people who both apply and can pass the checks ) They cannot bring in phones, memory sticks, pens, or paper. they have to pass through a scanner to enter and leave the floor. They work on stations with locked down ports and restricted internet access. I went there for a meeting but was not allowed on the floor because it was not pre-approved by security. If the Apple centers where Siri errors are reviewed is like that, it would be hard to sneak recordings out.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    I have worked in similar locked-down environments. Phones, cameras, USB keys, and so on were all checked into lockers before entering the secure area, and this was despite the fact that the computers had all their ports physically glued shut, and there were digital locks and snooping going on as well. At some level, you have to accept that things like Siri operate just like talking to human customer service representatives, who these days always begin conversations with a rote "This call may be recorded for quality and customer service purposes." What it comes down to is whether you trust the company to be unreasonably diligent in controlling what happens to these recordings. If there is a criticism to be levelled here, I think it is around the question of how well Apple and everyone else in this space allow consumers to make informed choices. Fine print in a voluminous user agreement is not nearly the same standard of disclosure as "Your words may be recorded for quality and customer service purposes" every time you say "Hey Siri." The latter may be impractical, of course, but perhaps there is a middle ground. It's not a dichotomy.
oiasdjfoiasd 7y ago
and?
softwaredoug 7y ago
I read TFA and still can’t tell - what exactly were the contractors doing? We’re they grading Siri’s quality responding? Translating the voice to text to help Siri get smarter? Both? Something else?
KaiserPro 7y ago
I don't see how any of this is surprising. If you want to improve your voice recognition, then you need to have a ground truth. To continuously improve, you must validate, isolate and update the corner cases. This means listening to the failed speech to text events, ones with low confidence, and a sampling of high confidence events. This is literally what google voice was for, it was a way of google getting lots and lots of samples of people talking using a phone's microphone. Almost certainly google/apple/amazon will be sampling photos, emails anything that goes through a ML pipeline, humans will see. Now, ofcourse apple have positioned them selves as a privacy first company, so this is a big no no. They should have re-asked for permission (I'm pretty sure they talked about this in the Terms and conditions, there was some noise about it when siri first came out. )
- HALtheWise 7y ago
  As a very minor point of fact, Google did have a service that (allegedly) existed primarily to collect voice training data, but it was GOOG-411, not Google Voice. Google Voice still exists, is an excellent service, and to my knowledge has not been credibly accused of primarily serving as a data collection tool.
- mffnbs 7y ago
  This is just how assisted machine learning works. The model needs to be updated with corrected annotated data that its gotten wrong in the past. It needs to have enough of this data until the model accounts for it properly so that it begins to prioritize the corrected label instead of the incorrect one. You're not going to be able to go in and hand-fix the model so that it doesn't cause these errors. This is one of the biggest ongoing issues with convolutional neural networks - you cannot debug them to determine why something went wrong.
- eloisius 7y ago
  >If you want to improve your voice recognition, then you need to have a ground truth This is true, but that doesn't automatically make it okay for them to offload this expensive resource to their customers without making it transparent that they were doing so. >This is literally what google voice was for Who cares? It's completely expected from Google, they use their customer data to do everything. I expect more from Apple. They have a (so far) great track record of protecting their customer's privacy. I fully expect Google, Facebook, et al to be doing ML on my photos, and that's why I'm bought into the Apple ecosystem instead of Google's. I value that my data is private more than being bombarded with stupid "collections" that the Google Assistant puts together with AI. I really hope this doesn't indicate a new direction for Apple.
neya 7y ago
"What happens in your iPhone, stays in your iPhone"
alpb 7y ago
Doesn't Siri try to do on-device voice analyis? I thought the promise of Apple was not to upload your data to improve their systems (hence their ML systems aren't that good).
- dsp 7y ago
  Siri depends on internet connectivity.
strin 7y ago
Sure - you can argue that to improve speech recognition you’ll need to collect ground truth. But only a tiny fraction of the billion users are tech savvy enough to realize this. Most people are kept in the dark. And we are trusting Apple to be benevolent to not do evil with these recordings.
HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
Apple privacy huh? Not surprised. Apple should be actively avoided like BP and AT&T.
Prohias 7y ago
@jankais3r (Twitter) shared an iOS profile to turn off logging of server-side Siri commands on GitHub: https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS On your iOS device, visit the link above, download the “Prevent server-side logging of Siri commands.mobileconfig” Switch to the Raw view, tap Allow, then download the profile. Complete the profile installation in Settings by reviewing it and tapping Install.
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
“What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” Had they just not doubled down and came out with this statement when the other companies were getting grilled for listening I think I’d have a better opinion of them over all this.
- Fickry 7y ago
  Just remember thousands of icloud nude leaked
andrerm 7y ago
It is not surprising and it is how it works today but people don't fully understand it and can't make a truly infirmed decision. We, the ones who truly understand both sides if this, must stand in favor of the ones who don't.
esotericn 7y ago
If your data is being uploaded to a remote endpoint, it's gone. Yeah, we have stuff like GDPR to mitigate the damage, fine people when bad stuff happens. But ultimately it's _gone_. What actually happens to it is almost immaterial because most of the time, it won't be publicised, and you won't even know. But it's still there, on someone else's server. Gone.
hello_tyler 7y ago
They should have some option if voice recognition fails like 'Would you like to send this diagnostic voice memo to apple to further improve the user experience ?' that way you'd have a choice if for some reason you were discussing confidential information, I'd send it in 99% of the time. Most user leave that diagnostic shit on by default.
stunt 7y ago
Every tech company does it as-long-as-they-can / it-goes-public.
stunt 7y ago
It is just cheaper for tech companies to do this. Even if unsupervised learning is not doable, they could hire people and pay them to record their voices for supervised learning. It is just cheaper for them to do this.

198 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

acd 7y ago

Does it clearly say record so when using Siri in regards to GDPR? Whenever you call a call center they usually says this call may be recorded. Hidden wire tapping of conversations which some might legal wrangle to it is not legal in many countries. Aldo transfer of personal records to third parties is not legal. If someone speaks “I like political party x” and that is recorded that might be a registration of political opinion.

Havoc 7y ago

And this is why I've got gear on the way to build a DIY replacement with mycroft & field array microphone & a raspberry. I'll probably throw a blog post on hn despite not being true show hn

esotericn 7y ago
I'm looking forward to it!
Zenst 7y ago
Look forward to that, something on my list of things to do. Though for the mic array, I want to try out contact microphones, make a whole house far-field array that way, might work, might not, but it will certainly be educational. One aspect I've worked out is how to make a balanced contact mic using two piezo discs stuck back to back with a rigid layer in between acting as the pickup. Trick is that as the two discs are back to back, they effectively produce a balanced signal and that alone helps eliminate so much of the static/noise that contact mics due to impedance are susceptible too.
- Havoc 7y ago
  Well it's currently shipping so I'm doing this for better or worse Mic array...pretty sure the tech I ordered (respeaker 6 mic) is towards the top end of DIY mic arrays so hopeful that I'll get good real life results. Also very keen to work out whether I can use tensorflow to filter out baseline background noise BEFORE feeding the audio stream into mycroft. Planning on launching a new blog to document my experiments and failures on this ( https://kaizen.today https://kaizen.today - not yet live cause still waiting for said tech...but SEO links and all that)
  - MapleWalnut 7y ago
    I've used the same mic array and the provided software isn't great. In fact it's terrible, but ODAS[0] is amazing. It's super accurate, can track/isolate multiple audio sources, and has a web ui to visualize it. They also have config specifically to handle the respeaker and raspberry pi. [0]: https://github.com/introlab/odas https://github.com/introlab/odas
    - Havoc 7y ago
      Amazing! Thanks for the helpful link
  - Zenst 7y ago
    Yes, they have MEMS, looked at those a while back, was after something that I could add external mics as I need in my case and kinda ended up looking for a 5 mic input solution. Which last I looked entailed an external music input via USB unless I made something from scratch (would like to do that though wanted to work on the software and viability aspect of what I had in mind). But as that is one of my to do projects, I'll look into it again when time and resources prevail as things move fast in tech and might be something more suitable for my needs by the time I get around to this. https://www.matrix.one/products/voice https://www.matrix.one/products/voice Just read about that today, no idea if better than the respeaker option - software/support/features..etc, but may be worth having a look in too.
    - Havoc 7y ago
xigency 7y ago
Doing offline voice recognition is pretty challenging on Raspberry Pi since it is relatively underpowered. Using pocketSphinx with RPi 3, it takes 2-3x realtime to do recognition, and the accuracy is underwhelming. Most DIY voice assistants handle voice recognition and speech synthesis with online services, defeating the privacy purpose. If you would like to really take on Siri and Alexa, I would recommend using beefier hardware.
- perfmode 7y ago
  anyone aware of low-power ASICs available to DIY to perform inference using pre-trained models?
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    Yup, Google's Coral and NVIDIA's Jetson Nano. https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/ https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/ https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-kit?nvid=nv-int-mn-78462 https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-...
  - Havoc 7y ago
    Don't think you need that much power for inference. Plus at siri levels you can probably push it to cloud if need be
- Havoc 7y ago
  >Doing offline voice recognition is pretty challenging on Raspberry Pi Mycroft is hooked into some sort of mozilla cloud thing (deepspeech) I gather. So plan is to roll a baseline and then see if I can local host a deep speech server >I would recommend using beefier hardware Plan is to ultimately deploy a gpu accelerated tensorflow integration so beefiness of hardware has been considered. >RPi 3 4 cause true gigabit and usb 3

robbrown451 7y ago

I wouldn't see the problem with it if they were open about it and allowed opting in and out. I use Android phones, and there are many times I wish there was a human listening, usually when I am cursing at the OK Google lady for being so stupid. (yesterday: "no you idiot, I'm not going to tap one of the options for gas stations, isn't it f*ing obvious I'm driving a car??!!!")

msbarnett 7y ago
> I use Android phones, and there are many times I wish there was a human listening Google does the exact same thing to train the “OK Google” functionality. Apple wasn’t mechanical turk-ing Siri, this is about humans tagging prerecorded data for ML training datasets.
- robbrown451 7y ago
  Yes I wasn't suggesting that Apple or Google were having humans actually process the requests real time. My wish that they were listening would be satisfied if, months later, someone heard my frustrated response and there was a way they could register that in the ML training set or otherwise register that so that product designers could see it. (in the example above, it is more of a product design issue than a ML issue) That's actually what I am hoping for -- I'm not trying to make a minimum wage employee miserable, I would like the actual software to get smarter. (and maybe make the AI Google Lady a bit unhappy, if that is possible)
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    It seems to me the limitations with assistants aren't voice recognition but NLP. If I have to craft my query for a machine then you've failed to make a 'natural language' input.
    - robbrown451 7y ago
      I agree (mostly) but not sure how that applies to my comment. Yes my major frustrations with it is that it isn't able to form a helpful response, not that it gets the actual words wrong. And in the case above, it goes beyond that. Designers of the product (Google maps) have it present onscreen options you need to click, in response to a spoken request (e.g. "find gas stations on my route") that is likely to be by a person who is driving and should not have to look at a screen. I would argue that that is not just non-helpful, but irresponsible and unsafe. But I guess you are right, in that if they have the transcripts, they don't need to actually listen to recordings. Then again they might need to listen to recordings if they are trying to gauge user frustration.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cmdshiftf4 7y ago

Someday the general populace may come to recognize the true cost of demanding the "convenience" of smart voice assistants, automated photo-tagging, relevant product suggestions, etc. and maybe then we'll see outrage. Or we're already at that point, and the general populace has chosen perceived convenience above all else?

erikpukinskis 7y ago
The cost will be enormous. But I expect the outrage will be very similar to the outrage we see now towards industrialism: Yes, the costs are devastating, and a small minority perceive that devastation acutely (including me). But the vast majority of people think: oh well, would you rather be starving on a farm in the dustbowl? So I don’t expect any kind of major political unrest regarding privacy ever. Privacy Within Society was a blip in history. After that it was either/or and privacy was a thing you had to construct through separation.
- briandear 7y ago
  Was anyone’s privacy actually violated? The voices were anonymized and not tied to an identity or device. It’s like someone leaked random paragraphs of random emails with identifiers pulled out.
hutzlibu 7y ago
I see nothing wrong with smart voice assistants etc. I only see a problem with it all controlled by few corporations and all the proprietary algorithms underneath closed up.. They know all about us and we almost nothing about them. .. or in a dystopian future, even "they" then do not know how all the proprietary libaries, training data and algorithms etc. of all the smart homes and self driving cars and autonomous killer robots anymore, and then some conflicting virus gets out of controll and ... Booom.
robbrown451 7y ago
Someone needs to clarify what those costs actually are. Some people don't value privacy as much as others, and they aren't "wrong", they just have different values and priorities. Personally, I am quite fine having my smart voice assistant send my recordings to humans somewhere to evaluate to train the database. In fact I always assumed they were doing that.

Fickry 7y ago

Wait. Deja vu. Couple months ago I joke with my friend about if apple employee listening to siri users and using google search for send back information to they users.

sschueller 7y ago

How long until these recordings start leaking to the public because of a contractor not being up to security requirements or some employees taping recordings?

Tagbert 7y ago
I work for a company where we have contractors at the customer service centers. This is pretty standard for customer service workers. They handle reservations over the phone and customer support. The centers where they work are very locked down. They deal with customer names and credit cards as part of their jobs. They go through background checks. (It can be hard to get enough people who both apply and can pass the checks ) They cannot bring in phones, memory sticks, pens, or paper. they have to pass through a scanner to enter and leave the floor. They work on stations with locked down ports and restricted internet access. I went there for a meeting but was not allowed on the floor because it was not pre-approved by security. If the Apple centers where Siri errors are reviewed is like that, it would be hard to sneak recordings out.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  I have worked in similar locked-down environments. Phones, cameras, USB keys, and so on were all checked into lockers before entering the secure area, and this was despite the fact that the computers had all their ports physically glued shut, and there were digital locks and snooping going on as well. At some level, you have to accept that things like Siri operate just like talking to human customer service representatives, who these days always begin conversations with a rote "This call may be recorded for quality and customer service purposes." What it comes down to is whether you trust the company to be unreasonably diligent in controlling what happens to these recordings. If there is a criticism to be levelled here, I think it is around the question of how well Apple and everyone else in this space allow consumers to make informed choices. Fine print in a voluminous user agreement is not nearly the same standard of disclosure as "Your words may be recorded for quality and customer service purposes" every time you say "Hey Siri." The latter may be impractical, of course, but perhaps there is a middle ground. It's not a dichotomy.

oiasdjfoiasd 7y ago

and?

softwaredoug 7y ago

I read TFA and still can’t tell - what exactly were the contractors doing? We’re they grading Siri’s quality responding? Translating the voice to text to help Siri get smarter? Both? Something else?

KaiserPro 7y ago

I don't see how any of this is surprising. If you want to improve your voice recognition, then you need to have a ground truth. To continuously improve, you must validate, isolate and update the corner cases. This means listening to the failed speech to text events, ones with low confidence, and a sampling of high confidence events. This is literally what google voice was for, it was a way of google getting lots and lots of samples of people talking using a phone's microphone. Almost certainly google/apple/amazon will be sampling photos, emails anything that goes through a ML pipeline, humans will see. Now, ofcourse apple have positioned them selves as a privacy first company, so this is a big no no. They should have re-asked for permission (I'm pretty sure they talked about this in the Terms and conditions, there was some noise about it when siri first came out. )

HALtheWise 7y ago
As a very minor point of fact, Google did have a service that (allegedly) existed primarily to collect voice training data, but it was GOOG-411, not Google Voice. Google Voice still exists, is an excellent service, and to my knowledge has not been credibly accused of primarily serving as a data collection tool.
mffnbs 7y ago
This is just how assisted machine learning works. The model needs to be updated with corrected annotated data that its gotten wrong in the past. It needs to have enough of this data until the model accounts for it properly so that it begins to prioritize the corrected label instead of the incorrect one. You're not going to be able to go in and hand-fix the model so that it doesn't cause these errors. This is one of the biggest ongoing issues with convolutional neural networks - you cannot debug them to determine why something went wrong.
eloisius 7y ago
>If you want to improve your voice recognition, then you need to have a ground truth This is true, but that doesn't automatically make it okay for them to offload this expensive resource to their customers without making it transparent that they were doing so. >This is literally what google voice was for Who cares? It's completely expected from Google, they use their customer data to do everything. I expect more from Apple. They have a (so far) great track record of protecting their customer's privacy. I fully expect Google, Facebook, et al to be doing ML on my photos, and that's why I'm bought into the Apple ecosystem instead of Google's. I value that my data is private more than being bombarded with stupid "collections" that the Google Assistant puts together with AI. I really hope this doesn't indicate a new direction for Apple.

neya 7y ago

"What happens in your iPhone, stays in your iPhone"

alpb 7y ago

Doesn't Siri try to do on-device voice analyis? I thought the promise of Apple was not to upload your data to improve their systems (hence their ML systems aren't that good).

dsp 7y ago
Siri depends on internet connectivity.

strin 7y ago

Sure - you can argue that to improve speech recognition you’ll need to collect ground truth. But only a tiny fraction of the billion users are tech savvy enough to realize this. Most people are kept in the dark. And we are trusting Apple to be benevolent to not do evil with these recordings.

HNcantBtrustd 7y ago

Apple privacy huh? Not surprised. Apple should be actively avoided like BP and AT&T.

Prohias 7y ago

@jankais3r (Twitter) shared an iOS profile to turn off logging of server-side Siri commands on GitHub: https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS On your iOS device, visit the link above, download the “Prevent server-side logging of Siri commands.mobileconfig” Switch to the Raw view, tap Allow, then download the profile. Complete the profile installation in Settings by reviewing it and tapping Install.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

“What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” Had they just not doubled down and came out with this statement when the other companies were getting grilled for listening I think I’d have a better opinion of them over all this.

Fickry 7y ago
Just remember thousands of icloud nude leaked

andrerm 7y ago

It is not surprising and it is how it works today but people don't fully understand it and can't make a truly infirmed decision. We, the ones who truly understand both sides if this, must stand in favor of the ones who don't.

esotericn 7y ago

If your data is being uploaded to a remote endpoint, it's gone. Yeah, we have stuff like GDPR to mitigate the damage, fine people when bad stuff happens. But ultimately it's _gone_. What actually happens to it is almost immaterial because most of the time, it won't be publicised, and you won't even know. But it's still there, on someone else's server. Gone.

hello_tyler 7y ago

They should have some option if voice recognition fails like 'Would you like to send this diagnostic voice memo to apple to further improve the user experience ?' that way you'd have a choice if for some reason you were discussing confidential information, I'd send it in 99% of the time. Most user leave that diagnostic shit on by default.

stunt 7y ago

Every tech company does it as-long-as-they-can / it-goes-public.

stunt 7y ago

It is just cheaper for tech companies to do this. Even if unsupervised learning is not doable, they could hire people and pay them to record their voices for supervised learning. It is just cheaper for them to do this.