Hey Siri, let’s talk about snooping on our chats

How private are your chats with Apple’s virtual assistant? The answer may be: “not very”.

Your conversations with Siri may be among those to be recorded and analysed by the tech giant’s workers. Picture: AAP

Hey, Siri - how private are our little chats? The answer may be: “not very”.

If you have ever used Apple’s “virtual assistant” - named Siri - your conversations may be among those to be recorded and analysed by the tech giant’s workers.

Apple was yesterday forced to apologise after it emerged that external contractors had listened to thousands of snippets of conversations between Apple users and Siri.

Australians are believed to be among those whose conversations were analysed. The Siri function, on iPhones and iPads, can be used for a range of purposes - from asking for directions to looking up potentially quite personal things up on websites, and can be accessed by users simply by saying “hey Siri”.

The research was undertaken in a push by Apple to improve Siri’s responses to human requests.

The revelation is particularly embarrassing for Apple because the Silicon Valley based giant prides itself on offering users privacy and security and brands itself as a safer alternative to Google and Facebook that garner user information for marketing purposes.

Apple hasn’t revealed which users were caught up in the monitoring exercise, however when the story broke, the Cork based Irish Examiner newspaper spoke with one of the contractors who said people with Australian accents were among the users monitored.

“Mostly it was users with Canadian, Australian or UK accents and there was a smaller team working on users with European languages,” said the former employee. The paper reported that this person had his contract abruptly terminated.

The person told the paper that contractors were expected to listen to more than 1000 recordings from Siri every shift before Apple suspended the practice around July. The paper said the contractors were required to listen to and grade the conversations.

There is no suggestion these researchers were aware of people’s identities - Apple was just listening, not spying.

Apple is not alone. This month it was revealed that Facebook and other tech giants including Microsoft were being investigated for “eavesdropping” on private audio conver­sations to ­improve their products.

It was reported that The Irish Data Protection Commission was investigating whether the tech companies’ practices had breached EU rules.

Apple, in a statement yesterday, said Siri used a random identifier to safeguard user identity and that after six months the device’s data is disassociated from the random identifier.

Apple said it used the audio of requests and a computer-generated transcription to improve its service “in a machine learning process that ‘trains’ Siri to improve”.

Apple said it was sampling less than 0.2 percent of conversations before the suspension.

Contractors are understood to have worked in several locations. Subsequent reports say 300 were fired in Cork with more terminated in Europe after monitoring stopped.

The Irish paper later reported that some of these contractors were non-EU citizens engaged by Globetech, a firm which offers recruitment, relocation, training and performance management to the multinational sector. They had two weeks to leave Ireland after their contracts were terminated.

In its statement, Apple said it planned to resume the Siri grading program in the northern hemisphere Spring after making changes to it. Audio recordings would no longer be kept and grading would be based entirely on computer-generated transcripts. Users would be able to opt-in to the scheme and opt-out again and only Apple employees could listen to audio samples.