Apple Fires 300 Irish Contractors Who Were Listening To Siri's Recordings

Apple has reportedly laid off 300 contractors in Cork, Ireland. The reason behind the termination was that the contractors were listening to 1,000 Siri recordings per shift before the company suspended the Siri grading program last month.

According to reports, the contractors listened to the drug dealers, private business deals, and also recordings of people having sex. However, the contractors denied the report and said "They (the recordings) were about a few seconds long, occasionally we would hear personal data or snippets of conversations but mostly it would be Siri commands," The News Minute quoted an employee.

Apple hired these contractors for listening to recordings and grade them for virtual assistant Siri. The company also said that the recordings were random and the Siri users were anonymous for the contractors.

The information about the contractors listening to the Siri recordings revealed when the Guardian disclosed the details with the help of a whistleblower. Before this big reveal, Apple users had no idea that the recording of their private conversation were heard by some third-person.

After the reveal, the Cupertino-based tech giant suspended the entire process of transcription and grading for Siri. "we will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions. We will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help Siri improve," reads Apple Newsroom.

However, if the users are not comfortable about the computer-generated transcripts then they can move out, "users will be able to opt in to help Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests. We hope that many people will choose to help Siri get better, knowing that Apple respects its data and has strong privacy controls in place. Those who choose to participate will be able to opt-out at any time," added the report.