Section:GDN 1N PaGe:9 Edition Date:190803 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 2/8/2019 17:44 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Saturday 3 August 2019 The Guardian •
9Divide and rule Ed Sheeran has thanked his fans via Instagram after breaking a tour record set by U2. The
singer said he will never forget his Divide tour, which is now the most attended and highest grossing of all
time. By his fi nal night in Ipswich on 26 August Sheeran, 28, will have spent 893 days on the road, 133 more
than U2. He beat U2’s attendance record on 24 May in France with a total audience of 7,315,970.PHOTOGRAPH:
SHUTTERSTOCKPolice explore
medication link
to plane death
Caroline DaviesPolice in Madagascar are investigat-
ing whether a British student who
fell from a light plane deliberately
opened the door after suffering a
severe reaction to medication, possi-
bly anti-malaria drugs.
Alana Cutland, 19, from Milton
Keynes, fell from the two-door Cessna
C168 on 25 July. She was studying nat-
ural sciences at Cambridge University
and had been carrying out research in
the remote area of Anjajavy. Police say
the pilot and a fellow passenger tried
desperately to keep her in the plane.
Her body has not been recovered.
Her uncle, Lester Riley, told Mail
Online she had become sick during her
time in Madagascar, off eastern Africa.
“ When she spoke to her mother on
the phone two days before the acci-
dent she was mumbling and sounded
pretty incoherent,” he said. “We think
she had suff ered a severe reaction to
some drugs. What happened, the fam-
ily believe, was a tragic accident, not
a suicide, and we are heartbroken .”
A police re-creation appears to show
the pilot and the passenger, Ruth John-
son , 51, a friend of Cutland’s, grasping
her leg. She is reported to have fallen
after a struggle to free herself. A local
police chief, Sinola Nomenjahary, said:
“ After 10 minutes of fl ight, Alana undid
her seatbelt, unlocked the right door
and tried to get out .”Apple suspends practice of
listening in to users on Siri
Alex HernApple has suspended its practice of
getting human contractors to listen to
users’ Siri recordings to “grade” them,
following a Guardian report revealing
the practice.
The company said it would not
restart the programme until it had con-
ducted a thorough review. It will also
let users opt out of the quality assur-
ance scheme in a software update.
Apple said: “We are committed
to delivering a great Siri experience
while protecting user privacy. While
we conduct a thorough review, we are
suspending Siri grading globally. Addi-
tionally, as part of a future software
update, users will have the ability to
choose to participate in grading.”
Contractors working for Apple in
Ireland said they were not told about
the decision when they arrived forwork yesterday, but were sent home
for the weekend after being told the
system they used for the grading “was
not working” globally. Only managers
were asked to stay on site, they said.
The suspension was prompted by a
report in the Guardian last week that
revealed contractors “regularly” heard
confi dential and private information
while carrying out the grading process,
including drug deals, medical details
and people having sex.
The bulk of that confidential
information was recorded through
accidental triggers of the Siri digital
assistant, a whistleblower told the
Guardian.
The Apple Watch was particularly
susceptible , they said. “The regularity
of accidental triggers on the watch is
incredibly high... The watch can record
some snippets that will be 30 seconds- not that long, but you can gather a
good idea of what’s going on.”
Sometimes, the Apple contractor
said, “you can defi nitely hear a doctor
and patient, talking about the medical
history of the patient. Or you’d hear
someone, maybe with car engine back-
ground noise – you can’t say defi nitely,
but it’s a drug deal ... you can defi nitely
hear it happening. And you’d hear,
like, people engaging in sexual acts
that are accidentally recorded on the
pod or the watch.”
Although Apple told users that
Siri data could be used “to help Siri ...
understand you better and recognise
what you say”, the company did not
explicitly disclose that this entailed
human contractors listening to a
random selection of Siri recordings,
including those triggered accidentally.
“Too often we see that so-called
‘smart assistants’ are in fact eaves-
dropping,’’ said Silkie Carlo , the
director of the UK campaign group Big
Brother Watch. “We also see that they
often collect and use people’s personal
information in ways that people do notknow about and cannot control.” She
added: “Apple’s record on privacy is
really slipping. The current iOS does
not allow users to opt out of face rec-
ognition on photos, and this revelation
about Siri means our iPhones were lis-
tening to us without our knowledge.”
The company is not alone in taking
fl ak for its undisclosed quality assur-
ance programmes.
Amazon and Google also use con-
tractors to check the quality of their
voice assistants, according to reports
in Bloomberg and on the Belgian TV
channel VRT , and contractors from
both companies have expressed dis-
comfort at the nature of overheard
recordings.
The revelation of Google’s pro-
gramme in particular caused concern
because the news report was accom-
panied by a leak of more than 1,audio clips, revealing that at least one
in 10 had been captured accidentally.
That prompted the data protection
commissioner for Hamburg in Ger-
many to ban Google from carrying out
those checks for three months, citing
a likely breach of the general data pro-
tection regulation.
The commissioner cited an “urgent
need to protect the rights and free-
doms” of Google Home users in
enacting the temporary ban, which
would otherwise be the responsibility
of the Irish data protection commis-
sioner, the lead controller for Google,
as well as Apple, in the EU. Google says
it had already ceased the practice on
10 July, when it learned about the leak
of audio clips.
Amazon and Apple escaped the
ban, Hamburg’s commissioner said,
because those companies ha d their
German head offi ces in Munich and
were thus covered by a diff erent com-
missioner under that country’s privacy
laws.
But the commissioner called on
other regulators to “quickly check for
other providers of language assistance
systems, such as Apple or Amazon, to
implement appropriate measures”.
Amazon is the only major provider
of voice assistant technology still using
humans to check recordings in the EU.‘You can hear a drug
deal, or you would
hear people engaging
in sexual acts ’An Apple
contractorGoal!
How Homeless World
Cup is changing lives
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Project saves a
threatened species
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ves a
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