My children often use my iPhone to ask Siri the most bizarre
questions. No matter what the question, however, Siri always
seems to have an immediate answer. Had I thought about it in any
detail, I probably would have figured out that there was some
form of back end data gathering/analysis being performed in order
for this to have happened. Yet, I must confess that I had no
idea that my Siri voice requests were being gathered, analyzed and
more importantly, stored for any length of time.
Late last week, it was reported that Apple disclosed just how long it
keeps this data- 2 years. Apple allegedly anonymizes the data
by assigning random numbers to represent the user and associates
the voice request files with that number. After 6 months, Apple
allegedly disassociates the number from the voice file. The
disassociated files are allegedly kept for up to another 18 months
for "testing and product improvement purposes." If
Siri is turned off, the associated data is
