Anonymized Siri Voice Clips Stored by Apple for Up to Two Years

[err404]

One thing is for sure, if Apple has any financial difficulties in the future, they will have some very specific personal user data and voice prints to sell.

Apple doesn't data mine this stuff for the sake of "storing."
It will eventually be sold.

I think this has been pretty clearly discussed. Apple isn't just sitting on this data. This data is incredibly valuable as an R&D tool and very relevant to Apples current research projects. However this is not good data for mining personal information. It is anonymous and after 6 months disassociated.
Are you intentionally ignoring the legitimate uses for this data just to feed your paranoia?

 

[gotluck]

Apple stores this stuff to improve Siri's accuracy and functionality, not to sell it. Apple makes its money from hardware, software and media sales, not from advertising (excluding iAd) and data mining.

...yet

 

[AppleScruff1]

Here's the problem: All these companies, no matter whether the do something that is objectively Ok or not, have to but what they do into non-threatening words so that the population stays calm. Whether they are up to no good or not doesn't make a difference. But by doing so, they don't give people the information they need.

"Anonymized" can mean so many things. When you post here as AppleScruff1, I have no idea who you are, where you live, what you look like and so on. So we could say you are anonymous. On the other hand, there are hundreds of posts under the same name, and I assume they are by the same person. So I can look at your posts in the context of other posts, and you are not anonymous. However, if you post on some other site under a different name (say if you are a member of the South Californian Rabbit Breeders, or a member of the Italian Olympic Rowing team, and frequently post on their websites) I wouldn't know, so that again is anonymous.

If what Apple stores is a voice clip with no information associated with it, so if there is no way to know that clip 1 and clip 2 come from the same person, that would be fine with me. From what I hear about Google, they do connect pieces about the same person. If they know ten thousand pieces of information that all belong to the same person, you, and the only thing they don't have is your name and address, that's not anonymous in a practical sense.

Who told you about the Rabbit Breeders and Rowing team?

 

[jovada]

just say: "closing parenthesis semicolon drop table sirivoicefiles semicolon dash dash" and wait for an email from Apple.

 

[mdelvecchio]

...yet

or in its entire existing since the '70s. thats a pretty good bet.

tacking "yet" on the end of any statement is pointless. "The Dali Llama hasn't assassinated the president in a bid for world domination....YET."

yeah man.

 

[gotluck]

or in its entire existing since the '70s. thats a pretty good bet.

tacking "yet" on the end of any statement is pointless. "The Dali Llama hasn't assassinated the president in a bid for world domination....YET."

yeah man.

I would argue that they've already tried to sell advertising ala google with iads but they just aren't very good at it.

yeah man

they already show a predisposition towards collecting user data and selling ads, unlike the dali llama towards murder..

 

[Nale72]

Ok, let me try to explain it in simple terms that you can understand.

When you turn on and use Siri for the first time, you send a voice clip to Siri servers with a "0" or NULL ID number. That triggers the server at Apple to generate a new unique random ID which is returned to the phone with the results of your question or request. That number is then stored on your phone so that when you send another request, it will be stored with that number again because you send that number with subsequent request.

Is that clear to you now?

If you disable Siri, a request with that number is sent to the servers stating that you are disabling Siri which they can use to delete any data that is still associated with that number. Your phone will also forget that number so that if you turn it back on again, you will get a new number.

Thanks, even though the talking down to me, indicating you need to explain as if it was to a baby wasn't really necessary . After reading many more similar comments to mine I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one not understanding how this worked and it was a question I genuinely wanted an answer to.

I obviously don't know the specific implemtation, but this is not a smoking gun. There are many ways that this can be done. For example it would be simple for you phone to generate (or at least be aware of) the unique token. That way when your phone sends a deactivation request it just needs to include the token to be deleted. Apple doesn't needs to maintain this link between them.
I would assume that this is the same process that is used to keep a consistent token between sessions.

Thanks for another plausable explanation, and without the talking down tone .

Your phone sends the voice clip, plus an ID so that Apple's server know where to send the reply. Without that ID, Siri couldn't work obviously. So Apple's server processes the voice clip, uses the ID to send a response back, and then they can and should throw the ID away.

Thanks for yet another explanation. However, I don't think this is the case though since they need to keep the ID to understand that both past and future clips are from the same phone. When you turn off Siri all your previously uploaded clips supposedly should be deleted (for the past 6 months or so).

 

[err404]

As for Siri knowing who your "wife" is, that can be accomplished by Siri storing who your wife is on your phone or by you tagging your wife in your contact record for your wife manually. Once you do that, Siri will know who your wife is without having to store that information in their servers.

You can also tag your "work" in your address book for geo-fencing as long as it has a valid address.

I agree that this could be looked up locally, but I'm not so sure that it is. When you disable Siri you are warned that “The information Siri uses to respond to your requests will be removed from the Apple servers. If you want to use Siri later, it will take time to resend this information". This strongly implies to me that Siri stores some personal data server side instead of using a local cross reference.

 

[gnasher729]

Thanks for yet another explanation. However, I don't think this is the case though since they need to keep the ID to understand that both past and future clips are from the same phone. When you turn off Siri all your previously uploaded clips supposedly should be deleted (for the past 6 months or so).

Why would they want to know that clips come from the same phone, or from the same user?

 

[err404]

Why would they want to know that clips come from the same phone, or from the same user?

It helps to generate data sets with the same accent. I assume that this the anonymized data that is kept for 6 months. This field is dropped after that time so they can no longer create data sets of the same voice.

 

[Stridder44]

Yup, Google does it and they get slammed.

Apple does it and it's no big deal.

All logic defied.

Are you kidding? Have you been on any other tech site? Because if you had, you'd know that it's completely the opposite. "Oh Google did it? Well it was probably for a good reason" But if Apple does it, it's always "Apple is evil!!!1!"

 

[Nale72]

Why would they want to know that clips come from the same phone, or from the same user?

I (and others) read that into the below quotes from the articles.

Apple says that it deletes your user data as well as the “recent” things that you’ve said to Siri whenever you slide the Siri switch off. But it keeps the older stuff, and it’s not exactly clear how this process works.

“If you turn off Siri, Apple will delete your User Data, as well as your recent voice input data,” Apple’s privacy statement reads. “Older voice input data that has been disassociated from you may be retained for a period of time to generally improve Siri and other Apple products and services.”

----------------

Apple generates a random numbers to represent the user and it associates the voice files with that number. This number — not your Apple user ID or email address — represents you as far as Siri’s back-end voice analysis system is concerned.

Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple “disassociates” your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file.


So according to the above, Apple store your user data and your voice imput data. If you turn Siri off Apple will delete you user data as well as your recent voice input data. To do this I guess they need to know which clips you have uploaded.

The second quote also indicates that my uploaded clips are associated with my (randomly generated) user number for six months.

And once again, I couldn't care less if Apple have my personal info, I just try to get the facts straight .

 

[Mr.damien]

Yup, Google does it and they get slammed.

Apple does it and it's no big deal.

All logic defied.

That's funny because it's exactly the opposite that happens in reality.

When Google use Safari security holes to spy at users that want anonymity, that's fine. Because you know, Google is not evil right.

When Apple store anonymised data that can't be used to identify you, they get slammed...

All examples are like this, just like the "map tracking" which was even worst on Android than iOS thanks to carrier provider, and Apple was shot in every newspaper while no word on Android ****.

 

[RiverCitySlim]

Google will sell your soul to the devil

/s

Wait, I thought Google was the Devil?

 

[Naaaaak]

So they're storing 2 years of voice data, presumably to test internal changes and confirm improvements. The problem is, it hasn't improved. Knowing Apple they are sitting on changes to be included with iOS 7 just to make a big deal out of it ("Siri 2"), even though server-side improvements should be released outside of the usual product release cycle.

 

[inscrewtable]

I am more concerned knowing that hundreds of years in the future some alien civilisation will pick up a broadcast of Bill Clinton [venerable leader of the free world] lamenting his confusion about the meaning of the word 'is'.

 

[DesertEagle]

Why would they want to know that clips come from the same phone, or from the same user?

Apple probably doesn't care... but the feds might

 

[RiverCitySlim]

As an Apple shareholder I certainly hope they will be exploring every possible avenue to profit from this data.

 

[64Mario64]

My only question is why especially since its anonymized - what benefit is there to Apple?

Same reason Google does it. It helps improve the search and probably helps improve voice recognition.

And once again, like what happened to Google, paranoids are going to freak out. Seriously, the people at ACLU need to get a life.

 

[maxosx]

Sorry, didn't get you, what do you mean? (my bad, English is just my second foreign language).

Oh I was just kidding, a bit of humor if you will

 

[SPUY767]

My only question is why especially since its anonymized - what benefit is there to Apple?

Scraping them for voice profiles and improving their matching algorithm.

 

[the8thark]

It'd be interesting to see how many "Siri, where's the best place to hide a body?" questions there are stored up.

And this asks the question would the cops and legal types be able to get access to these voice clips. And the IP addresses from where they were sent. For use in criminal investigations? And if the cops can get this kind of information, I wonder who else could?

 

[Morgan359]

who the f cares.

Facebook,google, apple, all the social networks take our data. the only thing they do is turn it into cash for them to give us free stuff. as long as they don't charge my credit card or use my porn habits to blackmail me what does it hurt?
unless you are in the gov. or other sensitive position can anyone legitimately tell me why i should care that they know everything about me

 

[diamond.g]

Yes, as long by "track what was said back to a user" you meant apple can track data point H1x00Xf11. It's an anonymized data point, nothing more. Just like apple's ad tracker service which actually increases user privacy by giving just an anonymized identifier instead of something like a device id number which can be tracked. They don't and can't track it down to John H. Somebody.

Keep in mind, this is Apples first attempt at something like this. Nuance has been doing this for decades, as you just said. And dictation is MUCH different from a assistant service like Siri which attempts to understand natural speech and create an action based on that speech, which makes it much more important for Apple to collect data based on how users use the product to tune Siris understanding of our natural speech.

And yes its anonymous. They create anonymous profiles per device that isn't associated to your actual physical identity or even your iTunes account. Didn't you read the article? Its not like Apple can say "John Jacob Smith IV from Louisville KY living at 333 Livington Rd asked Siri for directions to Florida." Lol thats not how it works.

If they can track it back to a specific device they can track it back to a specific user (unless one claims that their phone/device was stolen). That isn't to say that they do that actively, but if the the US government asked for who said they were gonna bomb something (given enough evidence and a warrant of course) Apple could find that device, thus the user (within that six month period).

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Oh! This is beautiful and just shows the rampant, unbridled hypocrisy that is found on this site.

Apple does this and it's no big deal but if Google did this you would all be frothing at the mouth about the invasion of privacy.

It's kind of pathetic.

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So if I turn off Siri in month 8, how does Apple know which data to delete?

Timestamps on the files?