Siri vs. Alexa vs. Google Assistant: Apple Struggling With Privacy Concerns

While Apple recently introduced the HomePod and iOS 11, former employees who worked on Siri told the Wall Street Journal the virtual assistant is lagging behind its competitors because of company concerns about user privacy. Siri, which competes with Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices, is struggling to rise above the competition because of Apple's culture, which prioritizes user privacy, making it hard to personalize and improve the product, former Siri team employees said. Read: Amazon Sees Apple's Siri Talking With Alexa Virtual Assistant, Report Says Amazon and Google assistants had an advantage over Siri because they had more data from their search engines they could use to train their virtual assistants and have less-restrictive privacy policies than Apple, the former employees said. The Journal report said Apple protects user privacy by randomly tagging Siri searches and keeping the information tagged for a timeframe of six months, unlike its competitors Amazon and Google, which retain the data until ask for it to be discarded. That issue has delayed efforts to boost Siri because Apple "relinquished control of data before it could be used to gauge the impact of software tweaks," employees told the Journal.