Siri was Caught Recording you Without your Consent…

…to the surprise of absolutely no one.

It came out recently that popular home assistant Alexa was listening to people doing…stuff. All kinds of stuff, in fact. Normal stuff, weird stuff, nasty stuff, you name it. And someone at Amazon is getting paid to sit there and figure out whether that was intentional or not to improve the AI.

The logic was perfectly fine — improve the service for user’s benefit. Good! Great! But the real problem was they didn’t tell anyone about it. And more importantly, didn’t give users a choice.

Siri was caught red handed late last month doing the exact same thing. Again, not telling anyone about it or giving them the opt-out. Below is live footage of Microsoft getting caught in the act:

As of today, the AI training program has been suspended globally over privacy concerns, because of course it has. Seriously guys, learn to keep the customer’s data privacy in mind here. Yeah, their data is immensely useful, but it’s also theirs unless you were explicity given permission to use it. The ‘ask forgiveness, not permission’ mindset when it comes to data mining is getting old.

The good news is that Microsoft will be giving you the option to withhold your data in the future. The bad news is that the whole story seems to perpetuate the idea that Big Tech can get away with whatever they want until they’re caught doing it.

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