Back in December, I posted an article about how Dragon Dictation, made by Nuance Communications for the iPhone, seemed to have a pretty serious privacy problem.

I just got around to reviewing their updated application today, and found that there is now an option NOT have every contact and name in your address book updated to their servers.

That’s a great improvement on respecting the customer’s privacy! Great job Nuance!

On their website, they say that “when you install the application, you will be presented with a screen asking you if it is OK to add your names to the vocabulary, after accepting the EULA… If you click ’NO’, Dragon will not read your address book and will not upload any names to the server. When you dictate, Dragon may have a harder time understanding phrases or sentences that contain names and spelling of names. And Dragon will not upload names in the future unless you change the settings.”

Perfect! That’s exactly what I wanted!

The “yes” part of the agreement is still what it was before…

“If you click ’YES’, ragon will read only the names from your contact list, not email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, or other personal information. Dragon will upload these names to the server, where they will be associated with the unique, anonymous 40-character device ID (UDID) from your iPhone. Whenever you dictate, Dragon will use these names to improve accuracy and spelling when you refer to friends, colleagues, etc. in your dictations. When you use Dragon, it will periodically synchronize names in your contact list to the server unless you change the Settings.”

I’m now going to try the application this weekend and see if it really does what it says it can do.