Apple Highlights Privacy Commitment After Settling Siri Spying Lawsuit
Apple today reiterated its commitment to Siri privacy, making it clear that Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles, nor has any Siri information been made available to advertisers or sold for any purpose.
Apple's newsroom post comes after it settled a class action lawsuit related to Siri for $95 million. Plaintiffs accused Apple of recording conversations captured after accidental Siri activations, and then sharing information from those conversations with third-party advertisers.
Two plaintiffs claimed that after speaking about products like Air Jordan shoes and Olive Garden, their Apple devices showed ads for those products, while another said he received ads for a surgical treatment after discussing it privately with his doctor.
There has never been any indication that Apple shared Siri recordings, and Apple told MacRumors in a statement earlier this week that the lawsuit was settled to avoid additional litigation.
In its full privacy overview, Apple goes into detail on the Siri privacy protections that are in place to keep user data safe. Apple uses on-device Siri processing wherever possible, and minimizes the amount of data that's collected as much as possible.
Siri searches and requests are not associated with an Apple Account and cannot be linked to an individual user, with Apple instead using a random identifier to keep track of data as it's processed.
Apple says that it does not retain audio recordings of Siri interactions unless users explicitly opt in to help improve Siri, and even then, recordings are used just for that purpose.
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