Siri “Regularly” Listens in on You Having Sex, Apple Insists “Only for a Few Seconds”

By Tyler Durden

Should it come as any surprise? And yet the details are shocking and outrageous. A whistleblower working for Apple has revealed to The Guardian that its popular voice activated helpful virtual assistant Siri, now in millions of households, “regularly” records people having sex, and captures other “countless” invasive moments which it promptly sends to Apple contractors for their “quality control”:

Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or “grading”, the company’s Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned.

We’ve long pointed out that according to Amazon’s Alexa terms of use, the company collects and stores most of what you say to Alexa (or perhaps what you groan) – including the geolocation of the product along with your voice instructions.

However, what’s not disclosed or at least not well known up to this point is that a “small proportion” of all Siri recordings of what consumers thought were private settings are actually forwarded to Apple contractors around the world, according to the new report. Supposedly this is to ensure Siri is responding properly and can continue to distinguish dictation. Apple says, according to The Guardian, the data “is used to help Siri and dictation… understand you better and recognise what you say”.

Also Read: Researchers Turn to Amazon and Google For Bedroom Health Surveillance

But an anonymous current company insider and whistleblower told The Guardian:

There have been countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on. These recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details, and app data.

Contradicting Apple’s defense that these sultry samples are “pseudonymised recordings,” Apple employees can know precisely who is having sex and where, and what time the deed was done.

Apple’s formal response to The Guardian investigation was as follows:

A small portion of Siri requests are analysed to improve Siri and dictation. User requests are not associated with the user’s Apple ID. Siri responses are analysed in secure facilities and all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements.

Just trust us, Apple appears to be saying. Most of what can be deemed sensitive data is captured through so-called accidental activations by “trigger words,” according to the report, with the highest rates of such occurrences via the Apple Watch and HomePod smart speakers.

“The regularity of accidental triggers on the watch is incredibly high,” the company whistleblower explained. “The watch can record some snippets that will be 30 seconds – not that long but you can gather a good idea of what’s going on.”

The insider continued, “you can definitely hear a doctor and patient, talking about the medical history of the patient. Or you’d hear someone, maybe with car engine background noise – you can’t say definitely, but it’s a drug deal… you can definitely hear it happening. And you’d hear, like, people engaging in sexual acts that are accidentally recorded on the pod or the watch.”

Further less than comforting is just how many across the globe have access to these private moments: “There’s not much vetting of who works there, and the amount of data that we’re free to look through seems quite broad,” the contractor continued. “It wouldn’t be difficult to identify the person that you’re listening to, especially with accidental triggers – addresses, names and so on.”

“Apple is subcontracting out, there’s a high turnover. It’s not like people are being encouraged to have consideration for people’s privacy, or even consider it. If there were someone with nefarious intentions, it wouldn’t be hard to identify [people on the recordings].”

The evidence continues to mount: Siri is a blackmailer’s dream come true… or spy agency, or voyeur, or political adversary, or just plain pervert.

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Siri and Alexa Fuel Sexism, UN Finds

Why do most virtual assistants that are powered by artificial intelligence — like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa system — by default have female names, female voices and often a submissive or even flirtatious style?

The problem, according to a new report released this week by UNESCO, stems from a lack of diversity within the industry that is reinforcing problematic gender stereotypes.

“Obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices,” Saniye Gulser Corat, UNESCO’s director for gender equality, said in statement. “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

One particularly worrying reflection of this is the “deflecting, lackluster or apologetic responses” that these assistants give to insults.

The report borrows its title — “I’d Blush if I Could” — from a standard response from Siri, the Apple voice assistant, when a user hurled a gendered expletive at it. When a user tells Alexa, “You’re hot,” her typical response has been a cheery, “That’s nice of you to say!”

Siri’s response was recently altered to a more flattened “I don’t know how to respond to that,” but the report suggests that the technology remains gender biased, arguing that the problem starts with engineering teams that are staffed overwhelmingly by men.

“Siri’s ‘female’ obsequiousness — and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women — provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products,” the report found.

Amazon’s Alexa, named for the ancient library of Alexandria, is unmistakably female. Microsoft’s Cortana was named after an AI character in the Halo video game franchise that projects itself as a sensuous, unclothed woman. Apple’s Siri is a Norse name that means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory.” The GoogleAssistant system, also known as Google Home, has a gender-neutral name, but the default voice is female.

Baked into their humanized personalities, though, are generations of problematic perceptions of women. These assistants are putting a stamp on society as they become common in homes across the world, and can influence interactions with real women, the report warns. As the report puts it, “The more that culture teaches people to equate women with assistants, the more real women will be seen as assistants — and penalized for not being assistant-like.”

Apple and Google declined to comment on the report. Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The publication — the first to offer United Nations recommendations regarding the gendering of AI technologies — urged tech companies and governments to stop making digital assistants female by default and explore developing a gender-neutral voice assistant, among other guidance.

The systems are a reflection of broader gender disparities within the technology and AI sectors, UNESCO noted in the report, which was released in conjunction with the government of Germany and the Equals Skills Coalition, which promotes gender balance in the technology sector.

Women are grossly underrepresented in artificial intelligence, making up 12% of AI researchers and 6% of software developers in the field.

The report noted that technology companies justify the use of female voices by pointing to studies that showed consumers preferred female voices to male ones. But lost in that conversation is research showing that people like the sound of a male voice when it is making authoritative statements, but a female voice when it is being “helpful,” further perpetuating stereotypes.

Experts say bias baked into AI and broader disparities within the programming field are not new — pointing to an inadvertently sexist hiring tool developed by Amazon and facial recognition technology that misidentified black faces as examples.

“It’s not always malicious bias, it’s unconscious bias, and lack of awareness that this unconscious bias exists, so it’s perpetuated,” said Allison Gardner, a co-founder of Women Leading in AI. “But these mistakes happen because you do not have the diverse teams and the diversity of thought and innovation to spot the obvious problems in place.”

But the report offers guidance for education and steps to address the issues, which equality advocates have long pushed for.

Gardner’s organization works to bring women working in AI together with business leaders and politicians to discuss the ethics, bias and potential for legislative frameworks to develop the industry in a way that is more representative.

The group has published its own list of recommendations for building inclusive artificial intelligence, among them establishing a regulatory body to audit algorithms, investigate complaints and ensure bias is taken into account in the development of new technology.

“We need to change things now, because these things are being implemented now,” Gardner said, pointing to the rapid spread of AI-powered virtual assistants. “We are writing the standards now that will be used in the future.”

Gardner said that changes are also needed in education, because the bias was a symptom of systemic underrepresentation within a male-dominated field.

“The whole structure of the subject area of computer science has been designed to be male-centric, right down to the very semantics we use,” she said.

Although women now have more opportunities in computer science, more are disappearing from the field as they advance in their careers, a trend known as the “leaky pipeline” phenomenon.

“I would say they are actually being forced out by a rather female-unfriendly environment and culture,” Gardner said. “It’s the culture that needs to change.”

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