Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or “grading”, the company’s Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned.
Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. They are tasked with grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri’s response was appropriate.
Bottom line: It doesn’t matter to me if this is Amazon or Apple. I don’t want human beings listening to the audio these devices record. In fact, I don’t want recordings made of my audio, period—I want the audio processed and immediately discarded.
Apple boasts constantly about taking user privacy seriously. There’s one right response to this report, and it’s to change its policies and communicate them clearly. A mealy-mouthed response about how the eavesdropping is done in a secure facility without an Apple ID attached is not good enough.
The Eurasian commission requires that products that depend on encryption technologies be registered upfront in this database for regulatory purposes. It has become a treasure trove of Apple product leaks in the last few years, from new Macs to iPads to iPhones and even accessories like Magic Keyboard updates.
Today, Apple registered regulatory entries for two iPads, with never-before-seen model identifiers of A2200 and A2232. These two entries join the A2197, A2228, A2068, A2198, and A2230 identifiers seen in the last post.
With a constant stream of new, console-quality games in the iOS App Store, and subscription gaming service Apple Arcade on the way, there’s arguably never been a better time to be an Apple gamer. Yet despite all the great new iOS games, sometimes you just want to relive your misspent youth.
In Steve’s world, apple.com had to be in sync with the current ad campaign. Customers were driven to the website by advertising, and the home page continued that conversation. No distractions allowed.
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The current home page doesn’t have a single focus. Or two. Or three, four, five or six. It literally promotes ten individual products. It’s the very definition of a dog’s breakfast.
Apple’s combination of hardware, software, and services adroitly positions the company to help provide easy and seamless authentication to its customers. And, in the long term, making authentication available to anybody on a platform benefits everybody on that platform.
To think through how GPS might reshape our brain and mess with our internal sense of direction, I called up Kate Jeffery, a neuroscientist at University College London who studies how brains navigate. She points out that there’s still a ton researchers don’t know about how the brain navigates the world, let alone how technology will interfere. And, tantalizingly, she wonders if certain forms of technology might even enhance our brains’ power to think.
No, not acceptable.
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Thanks for reading.