Stephen Chapman pens a rather long post about the privacy concerns he sees with the dictation feature on the iPad. I am just as paranoid as the next guy (nope, probably more) and even I don’t see the problem here.
Chapman is trying to paint Apple has being shady about this, when that is far from the case.
Apple warns you that contacts and user data *will be stored* on their servers when you turn on the feature. That’s about as much as you can hope for.
The one shady part that Chapman unearthed was that Apple says it will delete the information from its servers when you disable the feature, but in the Privacy Policy it states that the information may be retained for an unspecified period.
This may sound hypocritical, and perhaps my feelings towards Apple in general are clouding my judgment, but I think Chapman is making a mountain out of a mole hill here. The two statements clearly conflict and need to be clarified, but I think it is pretty clear what Apple is doing with the information: improve the accuracy of dictation (at least according to what Apple says in the Privacy Policy).
At the very least, this is a feature you can easily turn off.