Siri gave contractors confidential information and even records of couples having sex.
Apple has stopped the process of listening to a certain part of Siri requests, during which they could be listened to by contractors involved in speech analysis.
Recently, the British publishing house The Guardian published information according to which Apple shared part of Siri requests with third-party contractors. This was done in order to improve the quality of the virtual assistant. According to Apple itself, it has always protected the privacy of users and there is no security risk, since contractors received no more than 1% requests, and even then, lasting a few seconds. In addition, the transmitted requests were never associated with an Apple ID, that is, the contractors never knew which user the request came from.
However, the situation is still unsatisfactory. Third parties sometimes received very juicy information. After all, voice assistants are still very imperfect and Siri can sometimes turn on by accident, from extraneous sound. As a consequence, in this case, she can record something completely confidential. So, Siri gave contractors "confidential medical information, drug transactions and records of couples having sex."
In order to avoid further development of the scandal, the company decided to stop this process and revise the quality control program. In the future, users will be able to choose whether they want to share such data or not. The corresponding iOS update should be presented in the very near future (the exact date is not called).