Apple to Pay Siri Users in Settlement Over Accidental Siri Privacy Violations

A: Does your mobile phone company listen to your private conversations?

B: Yes

A: Does your mobile phone company save your private conversations?

B: For sure.

A: Does your mobile phone company sell your private conversations to 3rd parties?

B: No doubt on that.

You think that I exaggerated it a little? Absolutely not. These are no allegations but the unfortunate truth on today's world. Most of us had the following conversation for sure at least once:

"I was talking about [cats] and [my phone/my app/my search engine] showed me [cat] products in its advertisements." (Which is exactly true.)

Apple recently agreed to pay $95 million to resolve a lawsuit. The lawsuit claimed that Apple's Siri assistant, which is activated by voice, SECRETLY RECORDED and SHARED users' private conversations.

After these things were discovered, Apple said they were sorry for not meeting their own high(?) standards. They also said they will delete any recordings that accidentally started Siri. (Oh, thank you for that.)

https://bit.ly/3WaISua

"Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a proposed class action lawsuit that accused the iPhone maker of invading users' privacy using its voice-activated Siri assistant."

"The lawsuit was brought against Apple following a 2019 report from The Guardian that disclosed that third-party contractors were listening in on private conversations of its users issuing voice commands to Siri as part of its efforts to improve the quality of its product."

"Following the revelations, Apple apologized for not "fully living up to our high ideals" and subsequently introduced an opt-in to help Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests. It also said it will remove any recording that's determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri."

"Google, which has also faced accusations with its voice assistant back in 2019, is battling a similar lawsuit in the U.S. District Court."

Amazon Ring Gave Video Footage to Cops Without Consent or Warrant

What would you think if a company would access your door camera footages without your consent? But (allegedly) for good purposes of course. i.e. to save a life or catch a criminal or, or...

Well this is not a fictional scenario from a movie or a series but a reality which happened in the real life. Amazon shared the door camera footages with the police without a judge refarral or without the consent of the owners 11 times in 2022. For good(!) of course. (Well they claimed so.)

Yeah. Big brother can watch us (or is still watching us) but no worries. It's for your good(!)

Here, another unending "privacy vs. security" story. This time from real life.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/14/amazon_gave_police_unauthorized_doorbell/

#privacy #ring #amazon

"Amazon's home security wing Ring turned over footage to US law enforcement without permission from the devices' owners and seemingly without a warrant 11 times so far in 2022.

Though the internet giant has a policy that police generally cannot view recordings without owners' consent, that safeguard can be overridden with court orders and emergency requests – and it was through 11 emergency requests that Amazon gave the cops people's video data, without permission and no indication of a warrant. What constitutes an emergency request is left up to Ring itself, too.

'In each instance, Ring made a good-faith determination that there was an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to a person requiring disclosure of information without delay,' Amazon's vice president of public policy Brian Huseman told Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) in a written response to a list of surveillance-practice related questions submitted in June (2022)."

(Here is the PDF: https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/amazon_response_to_senator_markey-july_13_2022.pdf)

"'Recent research indicates that in addition to capturing troves of video recordings, Ring products also surveil the public by capturing vast amounts of audio recordings,' said Markey in a letter to Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy, who in turn noted that Ring did not currently offer voice recognition.

Ring doorbells are motion activated and do record audio up to 20 feet (about 6 meters) away, a distance which could potentially encroach into a neighbor's property or the street. Other doorbells can detect audio even further.

Markey's concerns include where the technology is eventually going. He offered the following tweet after publishing Amazon's letter online:

https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/status/1547276418425536519?s=20&t=0PILEVc5PN2ne7UILHGJkQ "

"According to Markey, who helped introduce the bill, it 'responds to reports that hundreds of local, state, and federal entities, including law enforcement agencies, have used unregulated facial recognition technologies and research showing that that roughly half of US adults are already in facial recognition databases.'"

Personal Data

According to Gartner, by 2019, 90% of organizations will have personal data on IT systems they don't own or control.

It seems that it is going to be a big problem against the privacy of most of the people on the planet.

(For more: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2513615)