Our mobile phone has become an essential tool in our daily lives. Many users are inseparable from their electronic device. However, this does not erase the concerns of users. For a long time, a stubborn belief persisted that our conversations would be spied on to offer advertisements based on our conversations. If all the studies conducted to date show that there is no correlation between what we say and targeted advertising, the idea that ears are lying around on our phone is not so outlandish.
The JDD thus recalls that in 2019, Dutch researchers from Apple’s subcontractor Globetech gave the alert on the confidentiality of voice data collected by Apple as part of its voice assistant Siri. At the time, France hardly spoke of this affair, until the words of Thomas Le Bonniec, a former data analyst, who claimed in The Guardian to have been instructed to listen to several hundred voice data.
For Dimitri, a former Apple employee quoted by Le Journal du dimanche, employees were “on the front line in processing data to ensure that Siri was working properly. Our mission was to process sound fragments recorded by the Siri trigger and note them to ensure that the software understood the request. Most of the time the people we listened to were in their car or in their kitchen. It was also very common to hear kids playing with the app or asking Siri to put Cocomelon on them.” A total of 1,300 people could be listened to per day per employee. Sometimes completely unintentionally when the country “Syria” or the first name “Cyril” (phonetically very close to Syria) triggered the app.
However, the employee wants to reassure users. “We didn’t hear anything sensitive. A pre-sorting was automatically done to filter out what could be sensitive. Of the tens of thousands of listenings that I have been able to do, I have heard nothing really disturbing. These were requests that were several years old. You could also hear laughter or life moments but nothing explicitly sexual for example. “Remarks against those of Thomas Le Bonniec, who claimed to have heard “very very intimate”, even criminal remarks.