Apple's Siri Listens to You Having Sex for ‘Quality Control’ (AVN)

Read the full article by Michael French at AVN.com

New report exposes ‘eavesdropping’ by Apple, similar to controversies surrounding Amazon and Google.

If you, like half a billion other people in the world, use an Apple iPhone, chances are that at some point your phone, via the “Siri” assistant, is eavesdropping on you, possibly even recording you having sex, or discussing medical conditions with your doctor, or some other activity—even committing crimes, if you’re that sort of person—you would rather not broadcast, according to an exposé by The Guardian newspaper last week.

Not only have you probably been recorded without your knowledge, but someone on the other end listened to that recording, in at least “a small portion” of cases, according to a statement by Apple to the Guardian. Apple transmits the recordings to contractors around the world, who listen in for the purpose of “quality control.” 

A whistleblower among those contractors revealed to the Guardian personal knowledge of "private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on,” according a Forbes.com report on the exposé. But that’s not all. The surreptitious recordings come accompanied by the eavesdropping victim’s “location, contact details, and app data,” according to the whisteblower—though Apple maintains that user data is strictly kept separate from the Siri audio recordings.