Apple Inc. said today that it will overhaul its controversial practice of listening in to Siri conversations to provide more privacy for users. 

Until recently, the iPhone maker had a team of contractors that manually reviewed Siri conversations to help improve the virtual assistant’s responses. The most important change to the program Apple announced today is that these reviews will become opt-in only.

The iPhone maker will altogether stop retaining the recordings of consumers who decide not to participate. That takes the human review element out of the picture, but users won’t have the option to opt fully out of the Siri quality assurance program. Apple said it will continue using the computer-generated transcripts that it has been employing together with the voice recordings. 

The company is also changing how it handles the data of users who do opt into manual reviews. Apple will enable them to back out at any time and plans to take the program in-house, meaning audio will be reviewed by employees rather than contractors. Apple employees will be instructed to delete any recording produced as a result of a user triggering Siri by accident.

The company plans to roll out the opt-in option in the fall as part of a a software update. Apple said it won’t using any audio recordings until then. The company suspended manual reviews earlier this month following a high-profile report about the program in The Guardian, which revealed that contractors regularly heard sensitive information while listening to Siri conversations.

“As a result of our review, we realize we haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologize,” Apple said in today’s statement.

The exposé about the Siri quality assurance program probably isn’t the only factor that led the company to launch the overhaul. Last month, German data protection authorities ordered Google LLC to temporarily stop listening to Google Assistant interactions and opened a probe into its practices. In the statement announcing the investigation, officials called on other tech firms to “swiftly review” their own quality assurance programs.

Apple was one of the two companies besides Google that the statement mentioned by name. The other is Amazon.com Inc., which also revamped its policies following the Google investigation by adding an opt-in option for Alexa users in Europe. 

Facebook Inc. made a similar about-face two weeks ago and Microsoft Corp. may be the next to follow. Microsoft currently doesn’t offer Skype and Cortana users a way to opt out of audio reviews, but the company recently revised its privacy policy to provide more transparency around its quality assurance efforts. 

Photo: atmtx/Flickr