Apple was suspected of listening to conversations and voice commands of users

[Brother]

Employees hired by Apple through a subcontractor are eavesdropping on users' private conversations and voice commands, El Pais reports, citing a former employee of Apple's contractor.

According to the interlocutors of the publication, secretly hired Apple employees in Spain listen to the recordings in different languages, including French and German. This is done to improve the performance of the Siri voice assistant software, the source explained. However, as the newspaper writes, not only direct requests to Siri are analyzed, but also personal conversations of users.

Audio recordings include more than just searches through the voice assistant. Due to errors in the system that lead to the sudden launch of the microphone, people can be heard talking on the recording. Most recordings begin with a voice command that launches Siri.

Apple declined to comment, citing its privacy policy, which states that "all Apple products and services are designed to keep personal information safe: only the user decides what to share and with whom." However, Apple's practice casts doubt on whether the company maintains complete data confidentiality.

 

[Brother]

In response to public outrage over news of Siri's recording of quality assurance requests, Apple had to suspend its monitoring program globally. The American corporation also announced the release of a software update that will allow Siri users to choose whether to participate in the assessment process or not.

Despite the fact that in the previous monitoring program, contractors received less than 1% of voice requests lasting a few seconds, and their work improved the quality of Siri's recognition, the information about wiretapping by people angered customers.

At the end of July, the Guardian spoke with one of Apple's contractors, who said that they receive records with confidential information such as data on drug transactions and conversations in the bedroom, and Siri sometimes crashes and starts recording, for example, when zipping clothes ...

In April of this year, Bloomberg talked about Amazon employees listening to recordings of commands from rival Alexa assistant. Three months later, the VRT News channel talked about the wiretapping through Google Assistant.

In terms of using "Alice" from Yandex, there is also an item on the processing of voice recordings in anonymized form. Yandex previously confirmed the attraction of people to markup voice requests, but emphasized that the share of such cases is extremely small.

 

[Tomcat]

Apple continues to listen to users through Siri​

Former Apple contractor Thomas Le Bonniec (Thomas Le Bonniec) released a letter in which he accused the smartphone manufacturer of avoiding punishment for illegal wiretapping of iPhone users, while the voice assistant Siri continues to eavesdrop and record requests from device owners.
According to him, the tech giant continues to violate user rights and illegally collect a huge amount of data.

In July 2019, Le Bonniec, who then wished to remain anonymous, spoke about employees hired by the company who were listening to conversations of iPhone users with a voice assistant, ostensibly to improve the quality of Siri. Thus, the company obtained confidential medical data, information about the sale and sale of drugs and audio recordings of intimate conversations.

In August, the company suspended the practice and apologized for using contractors instead of a car. Soon she announced changes, thanks to which the function of processing audio recordings of voice commands will work only with the user's permission, and only Apple employees will listen to audio data.
According to Le Bonniec, Apple has been using similar methods for several years.

 

[Tomcat]

Apple creates a spy iPod for the US government​

Apple worked with the US government on a "secret modified iPod." Former Apple software developer David Shayer told about it.
In 2005, the director of iPod software asked him to help two engineers from the US Department of Energy develop a special iPod, Scheyer said. In fact, the engineers were employed by Bechtel, a major US defense contractor. At that time, only four people knew about the project, now none of them work for the company. In addition, there is no documentary evidence of the existence of the project, since all communications were carried out personally.

The modified iPod was supposed to look like a regular player, but work in such a way that any additional data written to the device's hard disk could not be found. Scheyer's role was to assist developers from Apple. The contractors were assigned an office at the tech giant's headquarters and trained for months on how to operate and make changes to the iPod's operating system.

The modified device was a fifth-generation iPod, chosen for its easy-to-open case and large 60GB hard drive. In addition, it was the last iPod whose OS was not signed by Apple, making it easy to modify the software.

Although Scheyer has never personally seen the additional equipment, he believes the iPod was modified to function as an "invisible Geiger counter." In his opinion, such a device would be extremely useful in covert operations to collect evidence of radioactivity.