Technology is no different to how fast fashion or fast food is produced – much of the heavy lifting is done in “sweatshops” out of sight, staffed by people. This is by far the most dystopian element to the story: in exchange for giving away our privacy to tech multinationals the services of stressed-out humans are behind the machines.
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These are people who are precariously employed, often denied full employment rights and with little allegiance to the companies they work for, but hired to fill in the gaps in artificial intelligence. These products aren’t even 100% automated – behind the gleaming, smooth-voiced interfaces are underpaid, overworked and resolutely human contractors.
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Voice assistants are recording and listening to their users – what’s new? But there’s a subtler truth here worth considering: AI-powered “intelligent assistants”, lauded as efficient and effortless to use, are failing at answering even basic questions, and often activate accidentally at inappropriate times (well-known incidents include Siri interrupting the secretary of defence during a speech on Syria in the House of Commons, gatecrashing a White House press briefing and contributing to a TV news broadcast). Microsoft’s Cortana collects voice data in order to improve its service, while Samsung’s Bixby does the same, involving a third-party service for speech-to-text conversion.
Amazon’s Alexa stores queries until the user manually deletes them, and both Amazon and Google employ contractors to review a small number of their recordings (Google has stated in interviews that it “generally” provides a text transcript rather than the original voice recording, to third-party contractors).
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With Google Assistant, the software powering Google Home, audio is recorded and stored, but you can access your history and delete past recordings, and there’s an option to automatically delete your data every couple of months. It’s also worth comparing Apple’s approach with that of similar products. In one way this news is far from shocking – while Apple trades on the assertion that high-level security comes included with its products’ high prices, it has always been clear that by using Siri, or any voice assistant, the user must allow their phone to record and analyse their voice. This practice is not explicit in Apple’s customer-facing privacy documentation, and due to errors in triggering Siri – “the sound of a zip”, the whistleblower said, can often set Siri off – contractors end up overhearing private conversations including drug deals, business meetings, sex and private medical appointments.
This isn’t as simple as a voice assistant “spying” on its users: the report revealed that Apple’s contractors listen to the clips as part of the company’s quality control measures, working out whether Siri was triggered accidentally or on purpose, and whether its response was entirely correct. A news story in the Guardian last week confirmed what many Apple users likely already suspected: Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, has the power to record private conversations, and these audio clips aren’t always just stored on a server – a number of samples are passed along to third-party, human contractors who are paid to listen to them.
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