- Apple says your Siri data is never sold or used for marketing purposes
- The statement comes as the company settles a $95 million privacy lawsuit
- Apple settled to move on from the lawsuit and avoid further costly litigation
Apple says that data collected by Siri has never been sold to advertisers or used to build a marketing profile of its users. Instead, the company argues that its virtual assistant has been “engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning.”
The statement (via BBC News) comes as the tech giant has settled a class action lawsuit focused on its Siri assistant. The litigators had alleged that Siri had eavesdropped on Apple users without their knowledge or permission. As well as that, the lawsuit also claimed that user voice recordings were shared with advertisers.
For instance, lead plaintiff Fumiko Lopez argued that Siri recorded her and her daughter without their consent. The couple believe they were served targeted ads after discussing various products, including Nike Air Jordans.
In response, Apple said that “Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose,” adding that collected data is only used to improve the virtual assistant.
The tech firm has settled the lawsuit for $95 million. It denied any wrongdoing and pushed back against claims that it “recorded, disclosed to third parties, or failed to delete, conversations recorded as the result of a Siri activation” without permission.
The company said it settled to “avoid additional litigation so we can move forward from concerns about third-party grading that we already addressed in 2019.”
Apple’s reputation for privacy
Apple has long built a strong reputation for user privacy. Unlike some rivals, many of its features work entirely on-device, meaning user data is not sent to Apple’s servers, while the company said that outside experts could verify the privacy controls of the Private Cloud Compute aspect of its Apple Intelligence system.
With Siri, though, some data – including audio of your requests – is sent to Apple’s servers. However, Apple’s Siri terms state that “Unless you opt in to Improve Siri and Dictation, your audio data is not stored by Apple.” In other words, your audio is processed on Apple’s servers, but the company does not keep it after the job is done.
Transcripts of your audio may be stored by Apple. However, both your audio data and transcripts are anonymized: they are assigned a random identifier and are not tied to your Apple Account. The identifier is disassociated from the data after six months, and Apple may keep the data for up to two years.
Apple’s terms lay out that Apple does not use Siri data for marketing purposes and that it is never sold to anyone else. Audio is only stored if you opt in to improve Siri but, being an opt-in process, this feature is not enabled by default.
Still, if you don’t feel comfortable with Siri collecting and processing any data at all (including transcripts), you can turn off Siri by opening the Settings app and going to Apple Intelligence & Siri > Talk & Type to Siri, tapping Off and disabling all of the toggles.
If you want to delete your Siri and dictation transcripts, go to Apple Intelligence & Siri > Siri & Dictation History in the Settings app, then select Delete Siri & Dictation History.
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alexblake.techradar@gmail.com (Alex Blake)
