Apple has announced that they’ll resume the Siri grading program after the update coming this fall, which will turn off the retention of Siri interaction recordings by default and will enable users to opt in to let the company use their audio samples.
These audio samples will only be reviewed by Apple employees, as opposed to contract workers doing the same previously. Apple suspended the grading program soon after The Guardian reported last month that contractors were employed to evaluate Siri recording and would often come across private clips.
The company now says that Siri recordings that Apple employees determine have been inadvertently recorded will be deleted. The Siri grading program will be resumed in the next few months as soon as the software update that brings all these changes is rolled out to the users.
“As a result of our review, we realise we haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that, we apologise. As we previously announced, we halted the Siri grading program. We plan to resume later this fall when software updates are released to our users,” Apple announced. “When we store Siri data on our servers, we don’t use it to build a marketing profile, and we never sell it to anyone. We use Siri data only to improve Siri.”
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What data does Siri acquire?
In order to make a user’s iOS experience more convenient via Siri, Apple acquires the following data from a device when a request is sent to Siri:
- User’s name and nickname
- Name, nicknames and user’s relationship with his contacts
- Music preferences
- Home-kit enabled devices in the house and names of the users sharing the device in the same family
- Names of photo albums and installed apps on the device
- Shortcuts added by Siri
- Location of the device when a request is made to Siri
- Data from third-party apps
- Voice data when Siri is used for transcription
How to turn off Siri?
To turn off Siri’s trigger via voice command, Go to Settings, search for Siri & Search > turn off the toggle button for Listen for “Hey Siri”. You can also turn off Siri’s activation by pressing the Home button. Below the option mentioned before, users will also find the Press Home for Siri option — turn off the toggle button to deactivate.
To stop Siri from using the device’s location services, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Siri & Dictation and select Never.
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