Sunday, April 21, 2013

Big Apple is watching you.

If you have an Apple device with Siri enabled on it, Apple is recording your questions to Siri and keeping that data for two years.

Siri isn't just a pretty voice with the answers. It's also been recording and keeping all the questions users ask.

Exactly what the voice assistant does with the data isn't clear, but Apple confirmed that it keeps users' questions for up to two years. Siri, which needs to be connected to the Internet to function, sends all of its users' queries to Apple.

Apple revealed the information after Wired posted an article this week raising the question and highlighting the fact that the privacy statement for Siri wasn't very clear about how long that information is kept or what would be done with it.

Technically Apple keeps Siri user data for six months, associating that data with the user. After that time, the company will disassociate users from the data, meaning it will remove any identifiers for who input that particular query into Siri. But for the next 18 months, Apple said, it keeps the disassociated data for the sake of product testing and improvement purposes.

Please note, if you dig far enough into the "privacy policy" you'll see all this on your iPod/Pad/Phone, but it isn't something you're going to come across unless you go looking for it.

I solved the problem by disabling Siri and disabling "location services". That lets them know exactly where you are every ten minutes.

Really, if you have any thought that somebody who doesn't like you might be after you, your only hope is to ditch all these devices and stay off the web altogether.

Oh and by the way, despite all this super-duper spy crap, and despite every Google search and web site and Apple and etc. recording every damn thing we do every day, two wet behind the ears punks managed to blow up the Boston Marathon and evade every cop in the Northeast for almost a week. If they'd had a single brain between them they'd have never been caught.

But Apple and Google need to know what I had for lunch, and where, and with whom, and what we talked about, and what I've been surfing on the web.

If you don't feel like contributing to their ever-growing dossier on you, try DuckDuckGo. They could be a front for the NSA for all I know, but they SAY they aren't collecting any info on you. Worth a try, anyway.

The Phantom

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