Apple's Privacy Model Punctured By Whistleblower - Siri Sends Recordings To Contractors For Review

The Guardian is reporting that Apple has been sending audio from Siri users to contractors to review the quality of responses to queries, despite its very clear claims that 'what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone. 

Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or "grading", the company's Siri voice assistant

To be fair, it's part of the normal process of improving the quality of a voice assistant and would barely warrant a mention, but for the faux shock horror Apple and its cohort of tame bloggers and websites display when similar processes are exposed at Google, Amazon or Facebook.

More importantly, if Apple is taking the time to have the quality of its interactions reviewed, why has that not been accompanied with a large leap in the quality of voice recognition and the responses Siri provides? Apple has fallen will behind both Google and Amazon in this area and the only possible excuse was that its focus on privacy prevented large leaps forward in response quality. Now that proves not to be the case, Apple needs to seriously up its game.