1.) Apple literally plastered "What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone" ads around CES to make fun of competitors. - https://www.macworld.com/article/3331597/apple-privacy-billb...
2.) Apple always slams competitors over their lack of privacy on every keynote.
I think the outcry is more than warranted when the company is blatantly lying to your face in their marketing.
There are rumours [0] that Apple might enable local speech-to-text at some point, but as of now, that’s not how it works.
[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/15/apple-considering...
> You can use dictation instead of your keyboard to enter text with many apps and features that use the iOS keyboard.
> On iPhone 6s or later, and iPad, you can use dictation without being connected to the Internet. Earlier models of iPhone and iPad require an Internet connection.
Quote directly from Apple:
"The recording of the user’s spoken words is sent to Apple’s voice recognition server. If the task involves dictation only, the recognized text is sent back to the device. "
Source:
Page 69 in https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....
Siri is the service. Speech to text, while it can be improved with network access, works fine without it on current iOS.
There are plausible ways of doing this ethically and maybe many people thought it was being done that way.
(Eg prompting a subset of users for opt-in to a paid or volunteered time limited study )
Where my concern is, is that a lot of annotating work is now being done by low wage, low education workers and because of the increasing demand of annotated data sets this group is increasing. Also, because this work is increasingly getting outsourced, there is less direct control of who is doing the work and therefore the chance that a bad apple slips through is bigger. That's what's scaring me going forward.
I feel like devices like this should at least give the user the opportunity to play back whatever is sent for manual evaluation. e.g. it could send you an email at the end of the month listing the recordings it would like to use.
In my situation it was very clear that breaching the agreements would not just lead to direct end of contract, but also possible legal steps and a permanent record, leading to a much smaller chance for a similar job, for which I've specifically had an education. For uneducated workers, this if often less of an issue, especially for off-shore workers.
I also don't think low wage/education workers have less morals, but as the workforce gets bigger the chance of bad apples also gets bigger. I wrote exactly that in my previous comment.
The "high education well paid" team is more likely to do something with far reaching harmful impact whereas the "low wage, low education" worker doesn't have the power to do anything at that scale.
He was acting as a whistleblower because he was alarmed at the amount of data he was asked to review that was just people talking privately in their homes (not intentionally interacting with their smart devices)