Millions of iPhone users love using some of its various apps to convert nearly everything they say into text. Convenient, right? But have you ever wondered what Apple does with what you say?
According to a report originally posted by WIRED, Apple has confirmed that applications like Siri, its built-in voice recognition system, record your voice and store that data for up to 2 years. Your voice data is then stored on servers at Apple’s datacenter in North Carolina.
Here’s how it works: When you talk to Siri, the voice-activated assistant sends an audio file of your voice to Apple’s datacenter to be processed. Apple then generates a random number to represent you and associated your voice file with this number. This generated number represents you as far as Siri’s voice-recognition software is concerned, as opposed to your email address or user ID.
“Apple may keep anonymized Siri data for up to two years,” Muller (of Apple) says “If a user turns Siri off, both identifiers are deleted immediately along with any associated data.”
Siri uses this data along with your location, which is obtained from GPS or network sources, to provide more accurate answers to your questions. So your privacy concerns must be weighed against the accuracy of the service. Similar methods are used by companies like Facebook and Google.
If you want to know more about Siri, click here. To check out the details of Apple’s privacy policy, you can read it here.
