Due to the massive outcry over Apple's data privacy practices involving its virtual assistant, Apple announced on Wednesday that it will be halting its default practice of storing audio recordings of Siri conversations.
The company typically stores recordings of requests made by iOS and Mac OS users to the software's Siri personal assistant, which it then uses for review and quality improvement purposes.
Apple also sends these recordings to third party contractors, which hire real humans to listen to conversations with the goal of further improving Siri's responses.
In its released statement, Apple pledged to put a stop to the storage of the Siri recordings and to limit its use of human reviews of the recordings. Apple also mentioned that it will no longer be giving away the recordings to third party contractors and will instead use a small number of its own employees for quality reviews.
Apple was put on the spotlight earlier in the year when reports had surfaced that some of the employees that listened to the recordings had heard confidential information, drug deals, and even couples having sexual intercourse.
The employees that revealed the details during various interviews were working mostly for third-party companies hired by Apple to manually listen to Siri conversations.
The increased scrutiny over Apple's use of digital recordings had reverberated across Silicon Valley, forcing other tech firms to check their own practices. Following news of Apple's apparent data privacy breach, companies such as Alphabet's Google had paused its own manual reviews of virtual assistant recordings.
Defending itself from the accusations of privacy violations, Apple had stated that it has implemented various measures to make sure that the data of its users remain secure and private. According to the company, it does regularly delete audio recording after a set period of time.
The identity of the users on the recordings is also not made public and each user is assigned a random identifying number. Apple also claims that sensitive recording such as user's unread messages and their calendar appointments are not stored and are not sent to third party contractors.
Apple claims that having actual humans listen to random recordings is still a vital process in further developing its virtual assistant. The company had stated that the process has so far cut speech recognition error rates by more than 50 percent.
Data privacy activists had pointed out that Apple hadn't really properly informed its customers that their audio requests to Siri would be recording. It was also pointed out that there was actually no way of opting out from being recorded, aside from completely shutting Siri off altogether.
