Siri no longer safe! Apple contractors listen to iPhone recordings on the regular!

We Americans have been far too willing to give up our privacy for the sake of convenience.

Sure, you’ve heard me say this before, but on this subject a broken record may be what the nation needs to fully understand their mistakes.  We are allowing the game of “likes” and “shares” to infiltrate our personal lives, as social media platforms sell out our dirty browsing secrets to the advertisers who want a mainline into our wallet.

And we do it, gladly, simply because it’s convenient.

Now, as we continue to move new devices and applications into our personal space, it turns out that an old standby may be giving us more trouble than we imagined.

Apple is paying contractors to listen to recorded Siri conversations, according to a new report from The Guardian, with a former contractor revealing that workers have heard accidental recordings of users’ personal lives, including doctor’s appointments, addresses, and even possible drug deals.

According to that contractor, Siri interactions are sent to workers, who listen to the recording and are asked to grade it for a variety of factors, like whether the request was intentional or a false positive that accidentally triggered Siri, or if the response was helpful.

But Apple doesn’t really explicitly say that it has other humans listening to the recordings, and whatever admissions it does make to that end are likely buried deep in a privacy policy that few (if any) Siri users have ever read. Apple does note on its privacy page that “To help them recognize your pronunciation and provide better responses, certain information such as your name, contacts, music you listen to, and searches is sent to Apple servers using encrypted protocols,” but nowhere does it mention that human workers will be listening to and analyzing that data.

The news comes as smart home devices by Google and Amazon have both been shown to be privacy nightmares, with their microphones recording and sharing audio from their users without the customer’s knowledge.