The American Civil Liberties Union has made an appeal to Wired on Thursday, April 18th that it should raise its concern over the vague privacy agreement users sign when using Apple’s Siri, a voice-controlled digital assistant, that keeps stored what users asks or tells her to do. The American Civil Liberties Union has raised this concern because the vague agreement does not reveal when and how the company deletes the data from Siri servers. The privacy statement from Apple reads that, “If you turn off Siri, Apple will delete your User Data, as well as your recent voice input data. Older voice input data that has been disassociated from you may be retained for a period of time to generally improve Siri and other Apple products and services.”
“So your Siri queries may be stored anonymously by Apple for just a few months. Or they may not.”
ACLU lawyer, Nicole Ozer says that, “It’s not clear what ‘disassociated’ means. It’s not clear what ‘period of time’ means. It’s not clear what using it to ‘generally improve Siri and other Apple products and services’means. The only thing that’s clear is we really don’t know what may be happening to the personal information we have told Siri, even after we turn Siri off.”
When the post was published by Wired, a spokeswoman of Apple made contact with the site and described the privacy policy of her company by saying that the privacy of their customers is the most significant thing for them and the Cupertino-based company only gathers voice clips from Siri and anonymous data with only one goal and that is to make the voice-controlled digital assistant better.
“Here’s what happens. Whenever you speak into Apple’s voice activated personal digital assistant, it ships it off to Apple’s data farm for analysis. Apple generates a random numbers to represent the user and it associates the voice files with that number. This number — not your Apple user ID or email address — represents you as far as Siri’s back-end voice analysis system is concerned.”
“Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple “disassociates” your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes.”
Muller says, “Apple may keep anonymized Siri data for up to two years. If a user turns Siri off, both identifiers are deleted immediately along with any associated data.”
The ACLU lawyer, Ozer said that Apple’s explanation regarding Siri could be the first step in the direction to make the process public. However, the lawyer also said that there is still some room to betterment when it comes to notifying the customers. Pointing towards the FAQ page of Siri, Ozer said that Apple could add information regarding their privacy practices.
Source: iPhoneinCanada
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