Siri Continues To Tap into Your Conversations Despite Apple’s Apology, Whistle-blower Claims
Last year, Apple’s voice assistant Siri put the company under pressure for listening in on people’s conversations without consent, after a whistleblower’s report.
The company’s high acclaimed priority on security and privacy was under fire after a whistleblower said Siri has for long been listening in on people’s conversations either with or without consent.
The company at the time pardoned itself by saying the collection of data is used to help improve Siri and, besides, later rolled out an update offering a way for end-users a way to opt-out of the Siri grading program.
But in a new letter sent to all of Europe’s data protection regulators, Thomas le Bonniec, the former whistle-blower, now says Apple has ignored fundamental privacy rights and is continuing with the controversial data collection program.
“It is worrying that Apple(and undoubtedly not just Apple) keeps ignoring and violating fundamental rights and continues their massive collection of data,” the letter reads.
Bonniec says, despite Europe’s stringent and robust data protection laws, “Passing a law is not good enough: it needs to be enforced upon privacy offenders.”
The whistleblower is a former subcontractor who worked for Apple in helping transcribe user requests on Siri both in English and French. He said, at the time, that the recordings were of a wide variety of information ranging from names, addresses, messages, searches, arguments, background noises, films, and private conversations.
In the wake of criticism Apple, last year, made it clear that they haven’t been fully living up to their high ideals. For long the company’s privacy policy has been one of their selling points. “Privacy is a fundamental human right,” says the company’s privacy page.
The company rolled out an update in October that let users opt-out of Siri’s dictation improvement program and an option to delete stored recordings.
Here’s how to disable Siri data collection and delete your dictation history;
- To opt out of the Siri grading program, go to Settings > Privacy > Analytics & Improvement > Improve Siri & Dictation.
2. To delete your dictation history head over to Settings > Siri & Search > Siri History, then tap on “Delete Siri & Dictation History.”
And it is not just Apple who have been caught collecting data without user consent, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have also had similar happenings as well.
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