When Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit against its voice-assistant Siri, it released a statement explaining how Siri works and what its security policies are for its users. Apple recently released a blog post claiming that the company is committed to protecting user data and all its products are built on this foundation. It says, “Apple has never used Siri data to create marketing profiles, has never made it available for advertising, and has never sold it to anyone for any purpose.” It added, “We are constantly developing technologies to make Siri more personal and will continue to do so.”

Apple’s lawsuit

The latest lawsuit surfaced last week complaining that Apple routinely recorded private conversations with Siri after they activated it and disclosed these conversations to third parties such as advertisers. Here, two plaintiffs said that mentions of “Air Jordan sneakers” and “Olive Garden” restaurants triggered advertisements for those products.

A similar issue was pointed out in 2019 in a report published by The Guardian. The report revealed that human contractors, who are responsible for reviewing anonymized recordings and assessing whether the trigger was intentionally activated, sometimes encountered recordings of individuals discussing sensitive topics. However, there was no mention of these recordings being used for marketing purposes.
Following The Guardian’s 2019 report, Apple issued an apology and amended its policy.

The company has made audio recording from Siri interactions optional by default and has assured that users who consent to sharing recordings will no longer be accessible to third-party contractors. And now Apple has again shared the updated policy.

Apple’s Siri Privacy Policy

After all the uproar over Siri’s user privacy policy, Apple has shared several details about how Siri works. It also tells how loyal the voice assistant is. “To protect user privacy, Siri is designed to perform as much processing as possible on the user’s device, allowing personalized experiences without transferring and analyzing personal information to Apple servers,” the statement said. ”

It explains that when a user interacts with Siri, the request is processed on the device. Based on the requests, Siri decides whether it needs to be sent to Apple servers or not. For everyday tasks, like reading unread messages or providing widget suggestions, processing happens on the device. While Siri tries to reduce the amount of data consumption, Apple claims that it “does not retain audio recordings of Siri interactions unless users explicitly opt in to help improve Siri And even then, the recording is used only for that purpose. The user can easily opt out at any time.”

But it is not true that as soon as you start talking about a product, advertisements appear almost immediately. But it doesn’t have to be Siri. The most plausible explanation for this is that some apps secretly record on-screen user activity which is sent to third parties, a 2018 investigation revealed.

However, there is also evidence that smartphones come with software to listen to users. Last year, in September, we reported that a marketing firm, which counts Google and Facebook as clients, admitted to using phones’ microphones to collect information. It says that you get ads not just from what you search, but also from what you talk on the phone.