Siri records your conversations: this is what an ex-employee of Apple reveals
Apple is once again in the viewfinder. The League for Human Rights (LDH) has filed a complaint against the American firm for massive and illicit registration via recordings Siri. The accusation is serious: thousands of private conversations have been listened to, analyzed and stored without the knowledge of users.
Does Siri spy on us? Apple targeted by a shock complaint
Behind this revelation, a man: Thomas Le Bonniec. Former employee of the “Crowd Collect” project, he lifts the veil on a gigantic listening and annotation system of the registered conversations, sometimes by mistake. Recruited in Cork, Ireland, in a data processing center, he tells how hundreds of analysts dealt with thousands of sound extracts daily.
Among these recordings: harmless discussions, but also professional exchanges, medical confidences, political opinions or even moments of great intimacy.
The precise number of listenings dealt with by analysts remains vague, but according to Thomas Le Bonniec, each employee was to process approximately 1,300 recordings per day. Knowing that hundreds of people were working on this project, this represents millions of recordings analyzed each month, even tens or hundreds of millions in total. According to Apple, Siri deals with more than 25 billion vocal requests per month in the world, which lets imagine the extent of the phenomenon.
The interview with Nathalie Tehio, representative of the LDH, explains the motivations of this complaint:
And that doesn't stop there. In the United States, Apple is already stuck in a Class Action (collective action). Complainants accuse him of having exploited their vocal data for commercial purposes. Result: the apple brand is ready to unlock $ 95 million to avoid a convictionwhile continuing to deny in block.
Officially, Apple ensures that these records are anonymized and only used to improve Siri. But suspicion remain strong. Many testimonies report disturbing coincidences between private conversations and advertisements that are then displayed on their screens. What nourish an omnipresent feeling of surveillance.
So of course, this case relaunches an essential debate: how far can the digital giants go in the collection of our data? The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires clear and explicit consent, but these revelations show how fuzzy its application. At a time when Apple Intelligence is about to arrive in FranceSiri may not be just a simple vocal assistant.
