The IT Nerd

It’s not every day that Apple apologizes for anything. But today is one of those days. A few minutes ago, this was posted to the Apple website where they said this among other things:

As a result of our review, we realize we haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologize. As we previously announced, we halted the Siri grading program. 

Wow. An apology from Apple. Mind blown.

The company also committed to making changes:

• First, by default, we will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions. We will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help Siri improve. 
• Second, users will be able to opt in to help Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests. We hope that many people will choose to help Siri get better, knowing that Apple respects their data and has strong privacy controls in place. Those who choose to participate will be able to opt out at any time. 
• Third, when customers opt in, only Apple employees will be allowed to listen to audio samples of the Siri interactions. Our team will work to delete any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri.

All these changes are great. But I have to agree with the thoughts of YouTube star Aaron Zollo:

I would have expected a company that claims to take privacy as seriously as Apple claims to would have done this from the jump. But clearly that wasn’t the case and now they are paying for that. Hopefully they learn from this and make future decisions with privacy at the forefront as clearly this did not happen in this case.

UPDATE: Apple has posted an FAQ on Siri privacy and grading.

This entry was posted on August 28, 2019 at 11:47 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.