France’s human rights NGO, Ligue des droits de l’Homme, has accused Apple of violations of privacy, unlawful processing of personal data, and deceptive commercial practice, as first reported by Radio France and Le Monde.
The privacy complaint is based on information provided by a former employee who has supposedly shared proof of the massive collection and processing of Siri’s voice recordings without user consent.
The French complaint – filed with the Paris prosecutor on Thursday, February 13, 2025 – comes only weeks after the Big Tech giant agreed to pay $95 million in settlements for a similar lawsuit in California, despite not admitting wrongdoing.
Invasion of privacy and GDPR violations
Frenchman Thomas Le Bonniec began working for Globe Technical Services (GTS) in Cork, Ireland, in the spring of 2019. He was part of a team tasked to improve Siri’s multilingual chatbot response by listening, transcribing, and tagging the recordings triggered by Apple’s vocal assistant.
“On the very first day, we were told we were going to work on recordings of people talking to their assistant Siri or on recordings captured without their knowledge when the machine was triggered by mistake,” Le Bonniec told Radio France.
His job mainly involved checking Siri’s transcriptions for accuracy and determining whether they were accidental recordings. During his time at GTS, Le Bonniec said he and his colleagues listened to a considerable number of very private conversations triggered by mistake.
Some in the team, Le Bonniec explained, were also tasked with labeling duties. “They had to compare the keywords spoken during a recording and relate them to the data stored in the devices to which we had access such as contacts, geolocation, music, films, brands, etc. They tagged this personal data with keywords,” he added.
As consulted by Radio France’s investigation unit, the LDH’s complaint accuses Apple’s practices of going against GDPR rules on data protection and informed consent.
La @LDH_Fr dépose plainte contre Apple et son assistant vocal “Siri” pour violation de la vie privée, traitement illicite des données personnelles et pratique commerciale trompeuse. Pour lire l’enquête de Stéphane Pair à lire dans son intégralité ⬇️ https://t.co/GFQGaF5oBe pic.twitter.com/3MqY9b5P00February 14, 2025
Talking to a French TV channel, LDH president Nathalie Tehio said the complaint focuses on two main offenses: the invasion of privacy through recordings made without individuals’ consent, and the violation of EU personal data protection law.
“It’s not just spied on, it’s recorded. There is listening, recording, and even sending,” said Tehio. “There is recording without people’s knowledge. This is an infraction. On the other hand, there is a violation of the GDPR, that is to say, the fact that we have not given our informed consent for this aspiration of personal data. These are two crimes.”
Contacted by TechRadar, an Apple spokesperson pointed out how the French case is only a privacy complaint at the time of writing and no investigation has been opened yet.
Apple also explains it made some changes in 2019 to ensure Siri’s compliance with the company’s privacy commitment. These include no longer retaining audio recordings of Siri interactions. Users can also opt in or opt out of allowing Siri to improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests.
As per Apple’s statement published in January 2025, “Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose. We are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private, and will continue to do so.”
What’s next?
Whether the LDH complaint will open up a wider investigation into Apple’s data handling practices is too early to know for certain.
As mentioned earlier, however, Apple is currently dealing with similar issues back home. The California class action lawsuit, Lopez et al v. Apple Inc, accuses Siri of disclosing private conversations to advertisers.
Despite not confirming such allegations, Apple decided to settle for $95 million “to avoid additional litigation so we can move forward from concerns about third-party grading that we already addressed in 2019,” a company spokesperson told TechRadar at the time.
Considering that, as research from one of the best VPN providers Proton VPN shows, Big Tech needed less than three weeks this year to pay off over $8 billion in 2024 fines, the California lawsuit’s settlement seems to be set to to pile up among the costs of doing business rather than having a real impact.
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chiara.castro@futurenet.com (Chiara Castro)
