Recently, Irish media Irish Examiner reports on more details of the Apple Siri manual assessment program. According to one of the contractor employees, they organize and analyze up to 1,000 Siri recordings every day.
This employee previously worked for GlobeTech Data Analytics in Ireland. He said that Apple will share the recordings collected by Siri Voice Assistant to these contractors, and the daily work of employees is to classify and study various recordings. For example, whether Siri is accidentally activated, whether the user’s question can be correctly answered, whether the content is appropriate, etc.
At the same time, every employee responsible for Siri content analysis will be required to sign a confidentiality agreement before entering the job, prohibiting the disclosure of details of the work, or that they are working for Apple. He said that most of these recordings are just a few seconds of voice commands, but occasionally some discussion or conversations involving private data can be heard.
The reporter also pointed out that although the recordings of each Siri user are anonymous, they can still distinguish the accent of the speech, such as most users with Canadian, Australian or British accents, and a small team. Specialized in other languages in Europe.
After the British “Guardian” exposed the incident last month, GlobeTech began to ban employees at work. After carrying the mobile phone, Apple also announced that it would suspend the Siri manual evaluation plan, and these employees were immediately terminated by the company.
Apple said in an official statement in early August that it would suspend listening to user audio on its Siri and will allow users to choose whether or not to participate in the project when updating the software in the future; In the meantime, Apple said that these Siri conversations were analyzed in a secure environment, and the uploaded data was less than 1% of the total Siri data.
In fact, Apple is not the firstCompanies that are pointed out to listen to users’ voice content, including Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Voice Assistant, almost all have the ability to capture user speech and analyze behavior, in the hope of relying on manual means to train and improve the understanding of voice assistants. Ability to improve their response level.
After Apple’s incident was exposed, Google also chose to suspend the Google Voice Assistant’s listening and transcription features in Europe.
But for the Apple that sees personal privacy as one of the selling points of the product, a similar situation will obviously suffer more Paradox and controversy. At the same time, this incident also proves the limitations of current voice assistants on “smart” services.
In theory, if a voice assistant is smart enough, the work of analyzing voice can be done to the machine or locally, without actually uploading the recording and performing manual analysis.
This employee also said that he understands why Apple is doing this, but he added that Apple did not inform users of the possibility of Siri voice being uploaded and analyzed, and has never been mentioned in Apple’s privacy policy. And, so after the event was exposed, it caused a lot of user dissatisfaction.
“Uploading users’ private content without consent, I think this is the root cause of this incident.”
Source of the title: Apple