Siri Just Leaked Your Sex Life to Apple Contractors

We’ve known for quite a while that Siri can record your every word. Always hunting for its cue, how else would it be able to detect that often-excited “Hey Siri”? It does use buffers that only activate the listening device if it thinks it hears the magic words. So despite some allegations, Siri is not sending every word you say to Apple, its employees, or the government. But once you turn on the trigger? Then, it’s a different story.

Recently, an Apple contractor anonymously reported to the Guardian about the listening device. He or she stated that the contractors often hear clips of personal conversations, medical records, and, you guessed it, sexual acts.

Siri: From the Bedroom to Contractors

How exactly does your audio pass from your phone to Apple? Siri sends a small portion of its recordings out across the world to run quality tests. It occurs at random and could have just happened to you. These then improve the accuracy of the interface and allow it to better recognize individual voices. Apple’s privacy policy, however, is fairly uninformative in regards to the process. They merely state that Siri uses the data “to understand you better and recognize what you say”. What they don’t say is that ‘Siri uses’ really means ‘another human being uses’. AI technology has not fully progressed to the point where it can accomplish this task solo.

It’s true that Siri only sends data that it records during its listening process. But what many are unaware of is just how easy it is to activate it, especially on an Apple Watch. To summon Siri, a watch wearer must just raise the device to his or her mouth after enabling the “raise to speak” function. This naturally causes a plethora of unintentional triggers. Even without raise to speak, the whistleblower stated that Siri often hears “a zip…as a trigger”.

So, what does Siri pick up on regularly? Unfortunately, it’s a lot that the average person probably wouldn’t want out there. The Apple whistleblower explained some of the more common pickups:

“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.” -Apple whistleblower

A Breach of Privacy?

This Apple policy removes a great deal of transparency from many lives. This is especially true of those who wear watches in sensitive situations; not only might Apple know what you’re doing, but also who you’re with if they also have location services and Siri of their own. However uncomfortable it may be, users agree to the terms and conditions (clear or not) by using the products. And though Apple encourages contractors to report false triggers, this is for quality reasons, not privacy.

On the other hand, concerns have arisen over the quality of the people working as contractors. The whistleblower asserted that “there’s not much vetting of who works there”, which calls into question whether there are any workers with malicious intent. Could Apple’s policy be inviting questionable workers into a position where they can listen in to someone else’s intimacy? Moreover, could it allow undercover cops to bypass privacy rights to unfairly gain information to arrest someone? Might a previously innocent worker be tempted to commit fraud after accidentally hearing someone’s bank account information?

For those who believe this is a breach of privacy, the quick fix is simple: take off the watch. Though not a perfect solution, it removes most of the opportunities for false Siri triggers. After all, the contractor firmly asserted that the watch and the Apple HomePod speaker were the two most common sources of the accidental queries, with “snippets that will be 30 seconds”, plenty of time for the wrong party to get the information they desire.