
We need a full investigation into Siri's surveillance campaign - MindGods
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/14/apple-siri-secret-surveillance-campaign-investigation
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matthewmacleod
I know it’s a comment piece and all, but this kind of content really rubs me
the wrong way.

It’s totally fair to investigate and regulate companies’ privacy practices.
Many of them are downright scary. But we don’t need to deliberately
misrepresent them in order to do so. There is no “surveillance campaign”;
abusing the term weakens the argument against all of those actual surveillance
campaigns out there.

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elliekelly
Does this stem from the “Listen for Hey Siri” setting?[1] I’m assuming that
means my phone is “listening” at all times in case I say the magic words. What
I _wasn’t_ assuming was that snippets of that “listening” would ever leave my
phone. It’s unclear to me whether recordings being sent to Apple are a
separate setting. If I allow Siri to listen but have turned off Siri
analytics[2] was Apple still potentially listening?

Even reading the description of the second setting though doesn’t make it
clear Apple could be listening to recordings you never intended to make:

> Help improve Siri and Dictation by allowing Apple to store and review audio
> of your Siri and Dictation interactions on this device.

If my phone is in my purse and I say something that my phone thinks sounds
like “Hey Siri” I wouldn’t consider that an interaction but perhaps Apple
would.

[1] General > Siri & Search > Listen for “Hey Siri”

[2] General > Privacy > Analytics & Improvements > Improve Siri & Dictation

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tinus_hn
Siri voice recognition happens on Apple servers.

The device continually listens for the trigger words. Recognizing these
happens on the device.

Once it thinks it recognizes these words the Siri ui appears, the chime plays,
the recording starts and is streamed to Apple.

The scandal the author is referring to is that to improve the speech
recognition, they had humans listen to a random selection of the recordings
and correct the automatic recognition. Apples mistake here was that these
people were not Apple employees but contractors. One of these employees leaked
information about the recordings.

Sometimes the device will think it heard someone say ‘hey Siri’ when that
wasn’t really the case. Typically the the recordings will be of a random part
of a conversation but it may also be background noise of people having sex.

Compounding this problem is that to improve recogniton the Siri servers know
things you are likely to refer to, like the names of your contacts. That way
it’ll know that where one person may refer to Tom where another may be
referring to Thom. The contractors had access to this information.

Is this spying? It isn’t particularly covert. Again, it was a mistake for
Apple to outsource this task to people who clearly can’t be trusted. So now
you can tell Apple to leave your recordings out of that process and they have
stopped outsourcing the work. The fact that the contact information etcetera
is used is clearly mentioned in the agreement.

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toddmorey
I disagree that people even care if they are employees or contractors of
Apple. There are way too many questions here:

1\. Was this really only a problem of accidentally captured audio? 2\. Why did
this "improve voice recognition for Siri" program ever feel it was in scope to
use any recordings accidentally captured? 3\. Why weren't better controls in
place on something so personal from a company that specifically markets a
strong stance on privacy? 4\. Does turning off "hey Siri" actually prevent
ambient audio from ever arriving on Apple's servers? 5\. Why can't they
implement specific consent per recording rather than just do a stupid blanket
"some of your captured conversations may be used to improve..." 6\. What laws
are needed to better protect consumers?

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tinus_hn
It’s clearly stated that Siri runs on Apple servers and (now optional) that
people may listen to the audio to improve the service. So audio that is not
accidentally captured is not a problem, it’s sent with consent.

If you don’t have ‘Hey Siri’ on it only listens when you press the button.

Apple does have strong controls but they employ human beings. Control is not
absolute, their own secrets leak all the time and of course yours are not
immune either. They tried to improve control by making this optional and by
moving it in-house where they can for instance make it harder for employees to
record, screen employees etcetera.

The point of the program is to improve voice recognition, if Apple could
determine with certainty what is an accidental recording and what’s not they
wouldn’t need to improve it.

Specific consent, what do you expect? After every question to Siri a pop-up
appears that asks you for consent? That’s just not practical.

What laws do you feel were broken? How do you feel consumers were impacted?
The thing they consented to happened. Now there’s even more options and
control. What more do you want?

Do you believe people at the phone company can’t listen in on your calls? Do
you think bank employees can’t look at your statements? Do you think the
people at your ISP can’t check your traffic? What kind of law would you want
that mitigates that yet still allows these companies to provide their
services?

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deeblering4
This is why I would love to see more devices with physical disconnect switches
for mic and camera.

Software just can’t be trusted for this use case.

