We ask virtual assistants to turn on lights, music, set a timer or tell the weather forecast, but we don’t even realize that our requests and questions can sometimes be listened to by the person “on the other end of the wire”
Today, artificial intelligence is not so smart as to independently analyze a huge amount of data from the Internet and offer a ready-made solution to a person. It takes a lot of people to train computer systems. This means that from time to time people use voice recordings to teach Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant to understand the nuances of speech and distinguish “Austin” from “Boston” or “U2” from “YouTube”.
Google, Apple and Amazon have publicly stated that less than 1% of records have been verified by their employees. Later, Apple and Google suspended human verification programs, and Amazon expanded the features of its Alexa to include privacy settings. The New York Times author Brian Chen has published a short guide on how to protect your data from smart assistants.
Delete Siri history, Apple
- Open Settings, select General, then Keyboard. Turn off the “Dictation” option.
- Return to “Settings”. Select Siri & Search. Disable “Listen for ‘Hey Siri'” and “Call Siri with Home Button”. You will see a question asking you if you want to disable Siri and delete data from Apple servers. After that, all your history of conversations with the assistant will be deleted.
- To relaunch Siri, enable all of the above options.
How to delete your Alexa and Google Assistant conversation history, see The New York Times article.