Apple speaks out on Siri's privacy following a lawsuit.
Apple claims that it has never sold and will never sell Siri data to advertisers.
Apple has reaffirmed its privacy policies regarding Siri following the resolution of a class-action lawsuit that reignited rumors about whether the voice assistant was spying on users. In a recently issued statement, the company said, "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."
This statement came in the wake of an agreement related to a legal case from 2019, in which it was alleged that Siri was accidentally activated on Apple devices without the wake word being spoken, resulting in the recording of private conversations that were supposedly listened to by external contractors. A 2021 filing from the same lawsuit mentioned that the plaintiffs had discussed specific brands like "Air Jordans" and "Olive Garden," and later observed targeted ads for those brands on Apple Safari and third-party apps. This led the plaintiffs' attorneys to conclude that Apple must have sold those Siri recordings to advertisers.
Despite Apple admitting to providing Siri recordings to external contractors for quality control testing, the company strongly denies having sold Siri data for targeted advertising. Following the investigation and the 2019 lawsuit, Apple modified its Siri quality control testing policy, stating that user consent is now required and only minimally anonymized data is shared with company employees.
The statement also clarified that Apple does not retain recordings of interactions with Siri unless users explicitly choose to improve the service, and even in those cases, the recordings are only used for that purpose. Users have the option to opt out at any time.
While it might seem logical to think that Siri is spying on users to serve them targeted ads, there are other possible explanations. Ads can be targeted to people within the same network or in close proximity. For instance, if you talk about "Air Jordans" with a friend who just bought a pair, you might receive a targeted ad due to granular location tracking.
