Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 3 December 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Data Collection by Digital Assistants: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Gary Davis:

As we have covered in the session, there can be false activations of Siri. In fact, our grading programme is designed to identify those so that we can minimise it but maybe I will emphasise the point that a person's device is not listening him or her but it is listening for the words: "Hey Siri". At that point, it will contact our servers. It all happens on a person's device.

In terms of the precise things the whistleblower heard, I do not know precisely those elements but I go back to the point that that grader was not able to link those things to an identifiable individual. Those are the protections that we have put in place.