NEWS
Apple now appears to have finished its review and
has issued a statement apologizing for the way this
programme had been carried out so far. The company
plans to reinstate it later this autumn after making
some important changes.
The apology begins with a familiar statement: “At
Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human
right.” It then describes how the firm designed Siri
to protect your privacy – collecting as little data
as possible, using random identifiers instead of
personally identifiable information, never using data
to build marketing profiles or sell to others.
The statement goes on to make sure you understand
that using your data helps make Siri better, that
‘training’ on real data is necessary, and only 0.
percent of Siri requests were graded by humans. After
all of this, Apple gets round to the actual apology that
should have been in the first paragraph.
“As a result of our review, we realize we
haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and
for that we apologize. Apple will resume the Siri
grading programme this autumn, but only after
making the following changes:
“First, by default, we will no longer retain
audiorecordingsof Siri interactions.We will
continueto 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