
Apple contractors listened to 1k Siri recordings per shift: former employee - jmsflknr
https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/apple-contractors-listened-to-1000-siri-recordings-per-shift-says-former-employee-945575.html
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KaiserPro
I don't see how any of this is surprising.

If you want to improve your voice recognition, then you need to have a ground
truth. To continuously improve, you must validate, isolate and update the
corner cases.

This means listening to the failed speech to text events, ones with low
confidence, and a sampling of high confidence events.

This is literally what google voice was for, it was a way of google getting
lots and lots of samples of people talking using a phone's microphone.

Almost certainly google/apple/amazon will be sampling photos, emails anything
that goes through a ML pipeline, humans will see.

Now, ofcourse apple have positioned them selves as a privacy first company, so
this is a big no no. They should have re-asked for permission (I'm pretty sure
they talked about this in the Terms and conditions, there was some noise about
it when siri first came out. )

~~~
eloisius
>If you want to improve your voice recognition, then you need to have a ground
truth

This is true, but that doesn't automatically make it okay for them to offload
this expensive resource to their customers without making it transparent that
they were doing so.

>This is literally what google voice was for

Who cares? It's completely expected from Google, they use their customer data
to do everything. I expect more from Apple. They have a (so far) great track
record of protecting their customer's privacy. I fully expect Google,
Facebook, et al to be doing ML on my photos, and that's why I'm bought into
the Apple ecosystem instead of Google's. I value that my data is private more
than being bombarded with stupid "collections" that the Google Assistant puts
together with AI.

I really hope this doesn't indicate a new direction for Apple.

~~~
myko
> I expect more from Apple.

I expect them to improve their voice recognition which is way behind
essentially everyone else's, especially Google's. There's nothing wrong with
improving the tech in this manner as long as user's aren't surprised by it.

The fact that people are surprised by it is a problem though.

~~~
blub
This is not Python, where the principle of least surprise applies :)

Given the way this is being debated, it's almost certainly undesired by
customers and even potentially problematic under the GDPR.

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robbrown451
I wouldn't see the problem with it if they were open about it and allowed
opting in and out.

I use Android phones, and there are many times I wish there was a human
listening, usually when I am cursing at the OK Google lady for being so
stupid. (yesterday: "no you idiot, I'm not going to tap one of the options for
gas stations, isn't it f __*ing obvious I 'm driving a car??!!!")

~~~
msbarnett
> I use Android phones, and there are many times I wish there was a human
> listening

Google does the exact same thing to train the “OK Google” functionality. Apple
wasn’t mechanical turk-ing Siri, this is about humans tagging prerecorded data
for ML training datasets.

~~~
robbrown451
Yes I wasn't suggesting that Apple or Google were having humans actually
process the requests real time. My wish that they were listening would be
satisfied if, months later, someone heard my frustrated response and there was
a way they could register that in the ML training set or otherwise register
that so that product designers could see it. (in the example above, it is more
of a product design issue than a ML issue)

That's actually what I am hoping for -- I'm not trying to make a minimum wage
employee miserable, I would like the actual software to get smarter. (and
maybe make the AI Google Lady a bit unhappy, if that is possible)

~~~
cameronbrown
It seems to me the limitations with assistants aren't voice recognition but
NLP. If I have to craft my query for a machine then you've failed to make a
'natural language' input.

~~~
dodobirdlord
> It seems to me the limitations with assistants aren't voice recognition but
> NLP.

You probably speak English with a common American, Canadian, or British
accent. Quality for common-accent English is fairly high, but is much lower
for people with thick accents or who are speaking languages with smaller
available training datasets. These sorts of initiatives are mostly about
bringing quality up for those demographics.

~~~
cameronbrown
That's very true but I wish they'd work on making a better product as well.
The growth in that area seems stagnant from both Siri and Google

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sschueller
How long until these recordings start leaking to the public because of a
contractor not being up to security requirements or some employees taping
recordings?

~~~
Tagbert
I work for a company where we have contractors at the customer service
centers. This is pretty standard for customer service workers. They handle
reservations over the phone and customer support. The centers where they work
are very locked down. They deal with customer names and credit cards as part
of their jobs. They go through background checks. (It can be hard to get
enough people who both apply and can pass the checks ) They cannot bring in
phones, memory sticks, pens, or paper. they have to pass through a scanner to
enter and leave the floor. They work on stations with locked down ports and
restricted internet access.

I went there for a meeting but was not allowed on the floor because it was not
pre-approved by security.

If the Apple centers where Siri errors are reviewed is like that, it would be
hard to sneak recordings out.

~~~
braythwayt
I have worked in similar locked-down environments. Phones, cameras, USB keys,
and so on were all checked into lockers before entering the secure area, and
this was despite the fact that the computers had all their ports physically
glued shut, and there were digital locks and snooping going on as well.

At some level, you have to accept that things like Siri operate just like
talking to human customer service representatives, who these days always begin
conversations with a rote "This call may be recorded for quality and customer
service purposes."

What it comes down to is whether you trust the company to be unreasonably
diligent in controlling what happens to these recordings. If there is a
criticism to be levelled here, I think it is around the question of how well
Apple and everyone else in this space allow consumers to make informed
choices.

Fine print in a voluminous user agreement is not nearly the same standard of
disclosure as "Your words may be recorded for quality and customer service
purposes" every time you say "Hey Siri." The latter may be impractical, of
course, but perhaps there is a middle ground. It's not a dichotomy.

~~~
kitchenkarma
It's a bit naive thinking that employees would store their electronics in the
lockers. Even if you have spot searches (including cavity search) it still
doesn't exclude rogue employee just "forgetting" to store his or hers camera
in the locker.

~~~
braythwayt
Nobody in that business was naïve. Employees did not "forget," if they were
caught with their phone in the secure area, they were fired. I was told right
up front that certain things were zero tolerance, and everybody knew what they
were.

They took this very seriously.

Now when it comes to a deliberately bad actor, well, nothing is 100% perfect,
but there were many other security things going on that I am not going to
describe here, plus I know for a fact that there were security measures they
did not disclose to me.

But let's face it: Somebody, somewhere, can train themselves to memorize a
screen full of information. They could memorize something, go for a smoke
break, and upload what they memorized. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The point I made, and am still making, is that some companies care enough to
do everything reasonably possible to keep customer data secure, while other
companies do not. The company I described here cares. I believe Apple cares
too.

I suspect it will always be possible for someone to pull a small data heist,
but extraordinarily difficult to set up a regular pipeline to exfiltrate data.
The weak point is probably the digital systems. Most attackers would want
everything, and the way to get everything is with a vulnerability.

------
Havoc
And this is why I've got gear on the way to build a DIY replacement with
mycroft & field array microphone & a raspberry. I'll probably throw a blog
post on hn despite not being true show hn

~~~
xigency
Doing offline voice recognition is pretty challenging on Raspberry Pi since it
is relatively underpowered. Using pocketSphinx with RPi 3, it takes 2-3x
realtime to do recognition, and the accuracy is underwhelming. Most DIY voice
assistants handle voice recognition and speech synthesis with online services,
defeating the privacy purpose.

If you would like to really take on Siri and Alexa, I would recommend using
beefier hardware.

~~~
perfmode
anyone aware of low-power ASICs available to DIY to perform inference using
pre-trained models?

~~~
dodobirdlord
Yup, Google's Coral and NVIDIA's Jetson Nano.

[https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/](https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/)

[https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-
developer-...](https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-
kit?nvid=nv-int-mn-78462)

------
strin
Sure - you can argue that to improve speech recognition you’ll need to collect
ground truth.

But only a tiny fraction of the billion users are tech savvy enough to realize
this. Most people are kept in the dark. And we are trusting Apple to be
benevolent to not do evil with these recordings.

------
andrerm
It is not surprising and it is how it works today but people don't fully
understand it and can't make a truly infirmed decision.

We, the ones who truly understand both sides if this, must stand in favor of
the ones who don't.

------
JustSomeNobody
“What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.”

Had they just not doubled down and came out with this statement when the other
companies were getting grilled for listening I think I’d have a better opinion
of them over all this.

~~~
Fickry
Just remember thousands of icloud nude leaked

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softwaredoug
I read TFA and still can’t tell - what _exactly_ were the contractors doing?

We’re they grading Siri’s quality responding? Translating the voice to text to
help Siri get smarter? Both? Something else?

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neya
"What happens in your iPhone, stays in your iPhone"

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hello_tyler
They should have some option if voice recognition fails like 'Would you like
to send this diagnostic voice memo to apple to further improve the user
experience ?' that way you'd have a choice if for some reason you were
discussing confidential information, I'd send it in 99% of the time. Most user
leave that diagnostic shit on by default.

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stunt
It is just cheaper for tech companies to do this. Even if unsupervised
learning is not doable, they could hire people and pay them to record their
voices for supervised learning.

It is just cheaper for them to do this.

------
alpb
Doesn't Siri try to do on-device voice analyis? I thought the promise of Apple
was not to upload your data to improve their systems (hence their ML systems
aren't that good).

~~~
dsp
Siri depends on internet connectivity.

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Prohias
@jankais3r (Twitter) shared an iOS profile to turn off logging of server-side
Siri commands on GitHub: [https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-
NoLoggingPLS](https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS)

On your iOS device, visit the link above, download the “Prevent server-side
logging of Siri commands.mobileconfig”

Switch to the Raw view, tap Allow, then download the profile. Complete the
profile installation in Settings by reviewing it and tapping Install.

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stunt
Every tech company does it as-long-as-they-can / it-goes-public.

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acd
Does it clearly say record so when using Siri in regards to GDPR?

Whenever you call a call center they usually says this call may be recorded.

Hidden wire tapping of conversations which some might legal wrangle to it is
not legal in many countries. Aldo transfer of personal records to third
parties is not legal. If someone speaks “I like political party x” and that is
recorded that might be a registration of political opinion.

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esotericn
If your data is being uploaded to a remote endpoint, it's gone.

Yeah, we have stuff like GDPR to mitigate the damage, fine people when bad
stuff happens.

But ultimately it's _gone_. What actually happens to it is almost immaterial
because most of the time, it won't be publicised, and you won't even know. But
it's still there, on someone else's server.

Gone.

------
cmdshiftf4
Someday the general populace may come to recognize the true cost of demanding
the "convenience" of smart voice assistants, automated photo-tagging, relevant
product suggestions, etc. and maybe then we'll see outrage.

Or we're already at that point, and the general populace has chosen perceived
convenience above all else?

~~~
erikpukinskis
The cost will be enormous.

But I expect the outrage will be very similar to the outrage we see now
towards industrialism:

Yes, the costs are devastating, and a small minority perceive that devastation
acutely (including me). But the vast majority of people think: oh well, would
you rather be starving on a farm in the dustbowl?

So I don’t expect any kind of major political unrest regarding privacy ever.
Privacy Within Society was a blip in history. After that it was either/or and
privacy was a thing you had to construct through separation.

~~~
briandear
Was anyone’s privacy actually violated? The voices were anonymized and not
tied to an identity or device. It’s like someone leaked random paragraphs of
random emails with identifiers pulled out.

