Digital Smarts - What Info is Your Virtual Assistant Giving Away?

Virtual assistant programs such as Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri were created to make your life easier. Although they are great at helping you access information quickly and easily, in order to do so they need access to personal information including your location, your calendar, your contacts and much more. In addition,  audio data from voice commands may also be sent to the company’s servers to process the request and improve speech recognition. Your browsing and search histories are probably collected, too. Companies often claim this is to provide more relevant results, but the data may also be used to help send more targeted advertisements your way. Wondering what they are going to do with your data? The Privacy Statement page on Microsoft’s site goes into greater detail about use of the personal information the company collects from you on behalf of Cortana (and its other services like Bing and Outlook.com). If you use Siri or Google Now, both Apple and Google have lengthy declarations posted on their respective sites that explain what they intend to do with your data, as do sites like Facebook and Twitter.