Siri spying on you for ads? Apple denies claims that it sends users' recordings to advertisers

Apple's Siri has recently been blamed for spying on its users, but the company has denied all the allegations. The company claims that it has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles.

In Short

• Apple releases statement that denies allegations on Siri
• Its voice-assistant has been blamed for eavesdropping on users
• Apple states that its products are built on the fundamentals of user-privacy

After Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit against its voice-assistant Siri, it pushed out a statement explaining how Siri works and its safety policies for its users. Apple has recently released a blog post claiming that the company is committed to protecting user data and all its products are built on the same foundation. It stated, "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." It adds, "We are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private, and will continue to do so."

Apple's lawsuit

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

A report published by The Guardian pointed to a similar issue in 2019. The report revealed that human contractors, responsible for reviewing anonymised recordings and assessing whether the trigger was activated intentionally, occasionally 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 revised its policy.

The company made retaining audio recordings from Siri interactions optional by default and assured that for users who consent to share recordings, these would no longer be accessible to third-party contractors. And now Apple has shared the updated policies again.

Apple's Siri privacy policy

After all the commotion over Siri's user privacy policy, Apple has shared a bunch of details around how Siri works. It also points at how loyal the voice assistant is. The statement stated, "To protect user privacy, Siri is designed to do as much processing as possible right on a user’s device, allowing for personalised experiences without having to transfer and analyse personal information on Apple servers."

It explained 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 a daily task, such as reading unread messages or providing widget suggestions, the processing takes place on the device. While Siri tries to minimise 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 recordings are used solely for that purpose. Users can easily opt out at any time."

But it is not untrue that the moment you start speaking about any product, the ads pop up almost immediately. But it is not necessarily Siri. One of the most plausible explanations to this is that some apps secretly record on-screen user activity that was shipped to third-parties, an 2018 investigation suggested.

However, there has also been proof that smartphones come with software to listen to users. Last year, in September, we reported that a marketing firm, whose clients are Google and Facebook, admitted that it uses a phone's microphone to collect information. It stated that it is not just what you search for but also what you speak on the phone that gets you the ads.