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It's not surprising to me that they keep it, but they do not need to keep personally identifying information for six months in order to do that. Seems a little

It's not surprising to me that they keep it, but they do not need to keep personally identifying information for six months in order to do that. Seems a little improper, and also unnecessary, for employees to have access to that kind of thing if they're working on improving Siri.

misnome 14y ago
Hazarding a guess, history associated with a user could help accuracy or determine usage that causes problems? I mean, sure, don't keep the user data forever (and I imagine you can't, depending on local laws), but as long as it's useful? Six months seems a reasonable timescale if you have to identify, track, test and implement problems, and six months per user probably doesn't give you a whole load of statistics on it's own.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Presumably. Google even desires to keep the data personalized if you opt in and allow them.
  - glitch 14y ago
    Indeed. The more data points, the better. At least for speech recognition personalization for Google Voice Search, it is opt-in: http://support.google.com/android/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=186263 http://support.google.com/android/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an... Not so long ago, the primary goal of the 1-800-GOOG-411 service was to record people's voice queries for the purpose of bettering their voice recognition technology. After they got sufficient data samples, they discontinued the service. http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/google-wants-your-phonemes-539 http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/google-wants-your... > "Google had stated that the company originally implemented GOOG-411 to build a large phoneme database from users' voice queries. This phoneme database, in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching."
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      Fascinating. I had no idea that's what that service was being used for. Interesting, it was more or less retired as soon as Android blew up and voice search was everywhere.
- blueprint 14y ago
  It does not need to be personalized, it only needs to be associated with a given data set. How it's applied to the personal device in question is an implementation problem, not a matter of whether anonymization should have been implemented.

misnome 14y ago

Hazarding a guess, history associated with a user could help accuracy or determine usage that causes problems? I mean, sure, don't keep the user data forever (and I imagine you can't, depending on local laws), but as long as it's useful? Six months seems a reasonable timescale if you have to identify, track, test and implement problems, and six months per user probably doesn't give you a whole load of statistics on it's own.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Presumably. Google even desires to keep the data personalized if you opt in and allow them.
- glitch 14y ago
  Indeed. The more data points, the better. At least for speech recognition personalization for Google Voice Search, it is opt-in: http://support.google.com/android/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=186263 http://support.google.com/android/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an... Not so long ago, the primary goal of the 1-800-GOOG-411 service was to record people's voice queries for the purpose of bettering their voice recognition technology. After they got sufficient data samples, they discontinued the service. http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/google-wants-your-phonemes-539 http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/google-wants-your... > "Google had stated that the company originally implemented GOOG-411 to build a large phoneme database from users' voice queries. This phoneme database, in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching."
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Fascinating. I had no idea that's what that service was being used for. Interesting, it was more or less retired as soon as Android blew up and voice search was everywhere.
blueprint 14y ago
It does not need to be personalized, it only needs to be associated with a given data set. How it's applied to the personal device in question is an implementation problem, not a matter of whether anonymization should have been implemented.