Apple Says It Never Used Siri Recording For Advertising Purposes

Just a couple of days after Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a Siri eavesdropping lawsuit, the company reaffirmed today its commitment to privacy and detailed its efforts to protect the data from users of its digital assistant. The company also said that it never used the information from Siri conversations for advertising purposes.

“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,” the company said today. “We are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private, and will continue to do so.”

Apple previously denied that it did anything wrong with Siri data in the preliminary settlement. However, plaintiffs claimed in the lawsuit that the “Hey Siri” voice activation feature that Apple introduced back in 2014 allowed the company to record their private conversations without their consent and share them with third parties. Two plaintiffs also complained about seeing ads for products after discussing them, which they saw as the result of Siri recording their conversations for ad-targeting purposes.

Back in August 2019, Apple had already announced changes to its Siri data collection practices to address concerns over what the company does with that data. At the time, the company explained that it would stop retaining audio recordings of Siri interactions by default and that only Apple employees would be allowed to listen to audio samples of Siri interactions of users who have opted in to share them to improve the digital assistant.

“Apple 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,” Apple explained today.

The company further clarified today that Siri prioritizes on-device processing to limit the amount of personal data going through Apple servers. “For example, when a user asks Siri to read unread messages, or when Siri provides suggestions through widgets and Siri search, the processing is done on the user’s device,” the company explained. “The contents of the messages aren’t transmitted to Apple servers, because that isn’t necessary to fulfill the request.”

Apple also emphasized today that when Siri needs to send data to Apple servers to deliver more accurate results, the company uses a random identifier instead of personal Apple accounts to keep track of this data. Apple said that this is “a process that we believe is unique among digital assistants in use today.”

The company concluded its demonstration with the Private Cloud Compute infrastructure it built for Apple Intelligence features that require access to larger cloud-based models. “When Siri uses Private Cloud Compute, a user’s data is not stored or made accessible to Apple, and Private Cloud Compute only uses their data to fulfill the request,” the company explained.