Apple’s customer’s conversations with Siri were sent to third-party contractors without their consent

This same person said that employees were supposed to listen to 1,000 recordings from Siri during each shift. He added that each recording was only a few seconds long, and mostly contained commands said to Siri. However, the former Globetech employee admitted that “occasionally we would hear personal data or snippets of conversations.” He went on to say, “I understood the reasons why the company was doing it but I could see why people would feel it was a breach of privacy because they weren’t telling people. I think the lack of consent was the issue.” Both Apple and Globetech stated that the identity of every Siri user that was heard on the recordings was anonymous. Globetech CEO Kevin Kelly said, “This is a difficult situation for everyone involved. The nature of our business means that the majority of our employee contracts are fixed-purpose and are linked to client requirements and project lifecycles.”

Apple has prided itself on its ability to protect the privacy of iPhone users. After it was discovered last year that Facebook had allowed the profiles of 87 million subscribers to be sold without consent to Cambridge Analytica (and was punished by the FTC with a $5 billion fine), Apple CEO Tim Cook repeated a number of times that the company would never make its customers the product. While no one can be upset at Apple for trying to improve Siri, they can be upset that Apple passed on these snippets of recordings to companies like Globetech without its users’ consent. And remember, Globetech was just one of the companies that Apple had been paying to grade Siri’s responses.