Siri rarely becomes the hero of any news. Unlike Google Assistant, which regularly receives new features that improve its usability and increase interest from the target audience, Apple's voice assistant is rarely mentioned in the media, and even then in a mostly negative way. From the latter, the only thing that comes to mind is the scandal caused by the wiretapping of users, which, although it was not a secret from a legal point of view, was essentially a secret, since the listeners could not know when and for how long they were being recorded. This story has been continued this week.
This is Thomas le Bonnick, who decided that Apple has no right to eavesdrop on users at all and should be punished.
According to the ex-decryptor, he was not hired by Apple itself, but by one of its contractors. However, his responsibilities included transcribing and translating voice messages addressed to Siri or recorded in the background to a text format. But in this position, le Bonnick, according to him, did not work for long and soon resigned of his own free will, since he considered such a job completely unethical. What he just didn’t hear during the time he was decrypting, and many of the records - at least it seemed that way - were made completely arbitrarily, that is, in those moments when the user clearly did not communicate with Siri.
How Apple is following me
Siri listens to you even when you are not speaking to it. Many simply do not know about it.
It turns out that decryptors who translate voice recordings into text format do not deliberately anonymize what they hear, and this is impossible, given that they already hear it. Of course, no information about those who uttered this or that phrase, such as their names, surnames or e-mail addresses, is received by the processors, unless they themselves pronounce them. However, this does not prevent them from hearing very specific information that users share with their interlocutors, not suspecting that they are being tapped. Moreover, it is obvious that many of them would not have said even half of what sounded from their lips if they understood that all this would then go for decryption, Le Bonnick emphasized.
I'm not a prude and I'm pretty calm about surveillance. In the end, often it is aimed precisely at improving the quality of service and is conducted in my own interests. Wiretapping in this sense is no different from tracking movements or search queries. Another thing is that I am so calm about this, because I don't know when they write me and when they don't. But would I say what I can say at home in the presence of my loved ones, if I knew that someone is writing me right now, and then decipher it and send it for further analysis? Not sure. It's good that Apple has allowed the wiretap to be disabled. But I think that she is still obliged to answer by law for the lack of such an opportunity in the past.
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Ivan Kuznetsov