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Comment by israrkhan | Hacker News Reader

With Siri in macOS, Cortana in Windows 10, and Google Now in chrome.. The operating systems have turned into data mining software. This is an alarming trend. Companies are no longer making money from operating systems by selling licenses, but using their software platforms for harvesting personal user data. Cross-device and cross-browser tracking is catching up. And the worse part is that majority of consumers don't really have a choice

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How does voice dictation enable data capture that wasnt already doable before? They already have calendar apps, browsers for web searches. The things you type pipe through the OS already. I'm not saying your concerns aren't valid, just that I don't see how these make it more about data mining.

voice dictations were local. The data you stored in calendar did not go to cloud, and even if it did, nobody correlated your calendar with your web searches or your location. Various pieces of data existed in their own Silos, without needlessly going to cloud.

These personal assistants are combining data from all sources (your contacts, location, search history, calendar, across devices) , correlating and storing it in one place to build a personality profile. This has huge privacy implications.

What do you mean that they don't have a choice? Can't you disable the siri function?

I mentioned, majority of users don't have a choice. The way they bake it into Operating system, and leave it enabled by default, it ends up enabled on majority of devices even if user is not using it. Additionally these companies are going to extreme lengths by coupling these data-collection features with core OS functionality.

I upgraded to macOS Sierra on two machines yesterday. Both times, the setup program asked if I wanted Siri enabled or not.

Out of curiosity, why have you insisted multiple times in this thread that those three tools have the same profit motive mission?

It could well change in the future, but in your other comment you remarked that Apple is not in the user profiling advertising business today.

How Apple's privacy policy limits Siri:

http://www.macworld.com/article/3123459/ios/how-apple-s-hard...

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