TELL ME MORE: How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? With a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn’t use the internet.

Surprising absolutely no one.

Apple’s Siri AI assistant sends audio of sexual encounters, embarrassing medical information, drug deals, and other private moments recorded without users’ knowledge to human ‘graders’ for evaluation, a whistleblower has revealed.
 
Recordings from Apple’s Siri voice assistant are fed to human contractors around the world, who grade the AI based on the quality of its response and whether its activation was deliberate, according to an anonymous contractor who spoke to the Guardian. They claimed accidental activations are much more frequent than Apple lets on, especially with Apple Watch users – and wants the company to own up to the problem. […]
 
Siri isn’t the only voice assistant that transmits users’ private moments back to the mothership, of course – Amazon’s Alexa infamously has entire chat rooms for its human trainers to discuss difficult-to-understand audio clips (or mock funny recordings) and Google Home uses a similar system of outsourced “language experts” that allows the company to claim that no one at Google has access to the recordings its devices make.

h/t Larry (via BCF)

The article unwittingly provides a perfect example by quoting a business owner’s complaints about his employees who rejected new software because “importing an old address list into the new system generated so many errors that [he] had to hire two helpers.”
 
His diagnosis: “people are afraid of change.”
 
Look, dude, if something as simple as importing an address list creates multiple errors, the software you bought is a stinking PoS and you are a clueless bozo for blaming your long-suffering staff.

Remind me sometime to tell you the “when the sign company tried to computerize the layout department” story.