Sitting in her kitchen and eating baklava, my friend told me about her slightly creepy new job today: She answered an advertisement on Craigslist from an American company looking for German-speaking applicants who could transcribe audio records. She passed a test and got the job: Now she receives bundles of audio files (her wage is $3 per bundle of 50 utterances) and types their transcripts into a computer system. The files are—at least that is what she has gathered from listening to them—voice commands people speak into their mobile phones. Maybe it’s Siri they are talking to, or Samsung’s S Voice or any other voice command function. The first file was “Arschficken”. Then a lot of “Angelina Jolie naked” and the expectable “watch porn” search commands, many addresses, many recordings with traffic noises in the backgrounds, or people giggling in their kitchens. My friend doesn’t know what the company does with the transcripts or where the audio files come from (except that they are spoken in German).
I researched this a bit and found out that after sending the information recorded through a Siri command to a server farm in North Carolina, Apple (for example) keeps recorded audio files for two years. They say in the Service Level Agreement (SLA): “Your device will also send Apple other information, such as your first name and nickname; the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (e.g., ‘my dad’) of your address book contacts; and song names in your collection (collectively, your ‘User Data’)…. If you have Location Services turned on, the location of your iOS Device at the time you make a request to Siri may also be sent to Apple to help Siri improve the accuracy of its response to your location-based requests.”
Nothing new or excessively shocking I guess, but interesting to come across a real-life physical human being at the end of some line of digital processing. People all over Germany, all over the world, asking a digital device for the fulfillment of their most intimate desires (“Angelina Jolie” / “oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar” / “Do you believe in God, Siri?”), and a very real person writing all of this down somewhere on the other end, immortalizing the cravings of the nation.