Apple Says Siri Data Has Never Been Sold or Used for Marketing

[MacRumors]

No Siri data has ever been used for marketing purposes or sold to a third-party company for any reason, Apple said today in response to accusations that conversations Siri has captured were used for advertising.

A lawsuit that Apple has agreed to settle alleged that Apple provided information obtained from accidental Siri recordings to third-party companies for the purpose of marketing products. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit claimed that they were shown ads for Air Jordan shoes and Olive Garden after Siri recorded them speaking privately about those companies.

Apple said that did not happen because that's not the way that Siri works. Siri data that Apple uses is anonymized and not linked to a specific user, plus Siri data is not sold. Apple does use Siri information to improve the personal assistant, but the use of audio recordings is now opt-in and turned off by default. Apple's full statement:

Siri has been engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning. Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose. Apple settled this case to avoid additional litigation so we can move forward from concerns about third-party grading that we already addressed in 2019. We use Siri data to improve Siri, and we are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private.

The lawsuit was initially filed in 2019 after contractors working for Apple said that they overheard private conversations from accidental Siri activations. At the time, Apple's privacy terms did not explicitly state that it was using human oversight for Siri, and the contractors were concerned customers were unaware that accidental recordings were being listed to.

The customers who filed the lawsuit claimed that they were "regularly recorded without consent" and that they would not have purchased their iPhones had they known about this Siri feature. A judge initially threw out the lawsuit because the plaintiffs did not provide evidence of Apple recording their conversations, so it was refiled with the accusation that Siri data collected had been used for targeted advertising.

Apple says that it settled the lawsuit for $95 million to avoid additional costly litigation. As part of the settlement, Apple said that it "continues to deny any and all alleged wrongdoing and liability, specifically denies each of the Plaintiffs' contentions and claims, and continues to deny that the Plaintiffs' claims and allegations would be suitable for class action status."

The settlement already received preliminary approval from the court. All current or former owners or purchasers of a ‌Siri‌ device in the United States whose confidential or private communications were obtained by Apple between September 17, 2014 and December 31, 2024 are considered class members and could be eligible for a payment of up to $20.

Lawyers will set up a settlement website and eligible class members will be contacted.

Article Link: Apple Says Siri Data Has Never Been Sold or Used for Marketing

 

[airwalk331]

Doesn't seem like they have the data that tells them how bad Siri actually is...

 

[9081094]

We (Apple) did nothing wrong and that’s why we pay $ 95 million to the ones telling we did and settle the case.

Strange….

 

[vertsix]

"We use Siri data to improve Siri."

 

[Radeon85]

So they just want to pay $95 million for the fun of it then.

 

[jz0309]

We (Apple) did nothing wrong and that’s why we pay $ 95 million to the ones telling we did and settle the case.

Strange….

Not strange at all. Litigation could go on for years and cost could be higher than the settlement

 

[Digital Dude]

I plan to use my $20 as a down payment on a Maserati. 🤓

 

[nexusrule]

So they just want to pay $95 million for the fun of it then.

For a company as big as Apple with the kind of lawyers they have years in court would probably be more expensive and it doesn’t make sense to spend all that money if the settlement is cheaper.

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

They do however take a huge bag from Google for search so make of that what you will

 

[surferfb]

We (Apple) did nothing wrong and that’s why we pay $ 95 million to the ones telling we did and settle the case.

Strange….

Tell me you don't know how much corporate litigation costs without telling me you don't know how much corporate litigation costs. Paying $95 million is absolutely cheaper than this would have been to defend in court.

 

[ChrisA]

No Siri data has ever been used for marketing purposes or sold to a third-party company for any reason, Apple said today in response to accusations that conversations Siri has captured were used for advertising.

​

Apple says that it settled the lawsuit for $95 million to avoid additional costly litigation.

Apple settled to avoid the "Discovery" phase of the trial where all kinds of internal Apple communications would be made public.

My guess is that 99% of the public, including the lawyers who brought this case to Apple do not understand the difference between Siri and just "Audio Data". It is simple: Back in the 1960s, an old-school landline telephone sent audio data to another telephone. This data could be recorded or not. 3rd parties could listen in to the telephone line or not listen. Sixty years ago there was no "Siri". but all the allegations of the lawsuit could still be applied and in fact old-school landline phones were used to secretly record conversations. It took more work back then but, it was done.

So I think Apple might be technically correct when they say "Siri does not do that". But it might very well be that "microphone data" was abused and recorded. It might even be that Apple was not at fault. What if some background task ran and connected the microphone to some server where the audio was processed and that data was sold? Apple might not even know this was done.

If my theory is right then everyone is correct. Customer information was secretly captured and sold and Apple never used Siri for that purpose.

Today IOS will not hand over audio data to any app that wants it. But I don't think this was always the case.

 

[9081094]

Tell me you don't know how much corporate litigation costs without telling me you don't know how much corporate litigation costs. Paying $95 million is absolutely cheaper than this would have been to defend in court.

I truly don’t know. Will it also cost Apple that much when they had won the case? Wouldn’t they got payed in lost damages? I mean, they haven’t done the things where they were accused off (Apple says).

I don’t get it. Strange world to me.

 

[brofkand]

Well anyone who uses Siri knows it wasn’t used to improve the product, so what was the data collected for?

 

[msackey]

We (Apple) did nothing wrong and that’s why we pay $ 95 million to the ones telling we did and settle the case.

Strange….

I wondered about that, but so far I think I believe Apple, but maybe I'm being naive.

I can imagine why they are fine with settling out of court, because potentially (I'm guessing) that going to court might require Apple to reveal more about their technology than they really want to make public or some other thing like that.

So far with regards to privacy and confidentiality, I have trusted Apple. Again, maybe I'm naive.

 

[9081094]

I wondered about that, but so far I think I believe Apple, but maybe I'm being naive.

I can imagine why they are fine with settling out of court, because potentially (I'm guessing) that going to court might require Apple to reveal more about their technology than they really want to make public or some other thing like that.

So far with regards to privacy and confidentiality, I have trusted Apple. Again, maybe I'm naive.

At least you’re honest and open to all possibilities 👍🏻

 

[darkslide29]

I wondered about that, but so far I think I believe Apple, but maybe I'm being naive.

I can imagine why they are fine with settling out of court, because potentially (I'm guessing) that going to court might require Apple to reveal more about their technology than they really want to make public or some other thing like that.

So far with regards to privacy and confidentiality, I have trusted Apple. Again, maybe I'm naive.

This makes sense to me. The comments are mostly about how settling is cheaper than fighting it, but wouldn't that invite more baseless lawsuits in the future? If I had Apple money, I'd fight it anyway in principle, not allowing them to drag my reputation in the mud. But not wanting to reveal more about their technology in discovery is an interesting theory.

 

[EPiD3MiK]

Maybe they're telling the truth. SIRI isn't the one listening lol, some other unnamed program is though...

 

[anakin44011]

I plan to use my $20 as a down payment on a Maserati. 🤓

Or you can use the $20 to buy the entire private audio treasure trove from Android devices and Amazon's Alexa devices because they don't even pretend to keep that data private.

Then you can use that data to train yet another LLM that will become useless because it will reflect exactly how horrible humans are when speaking without filters.

On second thought, buy the Maserati.

 

[NT1440]

We (Apple) did nothing wrong and that’s why we pay $ 95 million to the ones telling we did and settle the case.

Strange….

Are you sure that’s what the settlement was actually about?

 

[Dave-Z]

Apple said that did not happen because that's not the way that Siri works. Siri data that Apple uses is anonymized and not linked to a specific user

I feel that while this statement is technically true on the surface, it's also disingenuous. Per Apple's privacy policy on Siri:

Your request history, which includes Siri transcripts and any related request data, is associated with a random identifier for up to six months and is not tied to your Apple Account or email address.

So your requests are assigned a random, but unique, identifier; so all your requests are associated with a single user, even though that user to Apple is allegedly unknown. This seems fine on the surface until you realize that all your requests are associated to that single identifier and it would not take much to piece together who is making the requests, especially considering later in the privacy policy it states:

When you use Siri and Dictation, your device may send contextual data to Apple, including from third-party apps you allow to integrate with Use with Siri Requests, such as:

• Contact names, nicknames, and relationships (for example, “my dad”), if you set them up in your contacts
• Form of address, if set in language and region settings
• Music and podcasts you enjoy
• Names of your and your Family Sharing members’ devices
• Names of accessories, homes, scenes, shared home members in the Home app, and Apple TV user profiles
• Labels for items, such as people names in Photos, Alarm names, and names of Reminders lists

Apple can say what they want about privacy, but it's all marketing. They harvest data just like everyone else with the end goal being to exploit users as much as possible for revenue.

 

[msackey]

This makes sense to me. The comments are mostly about how settling is cheaper than fighting it, but wouldn't that invite more baseless lawsuits in the future? If I had Apple money, I'd fight it anyway in principle, not allowing them to drag my reputation in the mud. But not wanting to reveal more about their technology in discovery is an interesting theory.

That's a good point. I wonder though that with this settlement, doesn't it mean the same thing can be put to court again? Isn't that what settlement means? I suppose there can be other baseless (if they are) lawsuits not related to this particular Siri thing.

 

[skit911]

We (Apple) did nothing wrong and that’s why we pay $ 95 million to the ones telling we did and settle the case.

Strange….

That’s how the “best country in the world” works.

 

[Sami13496]

Usually, if people talk about something, they are also likely to Google it within a short period or share information about it on services like WhatsApp. However, this is such a natural and obvious action that it often goes unnoticed. Instead, people tend to associate such instances with a specific conversation whose time and place they remember most clearly.

Apple has no reason to do something like that because they simply have no motive. It’s not their business, and they wouldn’t make a cent from it. Unless they did it secretly—but that’s a ridiculous idea, as it would make no sense to risk the entire brand image and the whole business for something like that.

 

[msackey]

Maybe they're telling the truth. SIRI isn't the one listening lol, some other unnamed program is though...

hehe From what I have read a while back, one of the reasons SIRI may not perform as well as other Voice Assistants is precisely because of the way it handles and anonymizes data. I can imagine how much easier it is to use identifiable data and combine it with other non-Apple technologies to get responses. A great challenge is how to do all of that with confidentiality of data in mind.

 

[surferfb]

I truly don’t know. Will it also cost Apple that much when they had won the case? Wouldn’t they got payed in lost damages? I mean, they haven’t done the things where they were accused off (Apple says).

I don’t get it. Strange world to me.

To give you an idea without getting into too much detail, a friend of mine involved in a small corporate lawsuit in the US that is easily already over $5 million per side in legal costs, and it's a completely run-of-the mill issue; we're talking two lawyers on each side. It's entirely conceivable by the end of it the winning party will have spent more money on lawyers than they will potentially get back. And then once that is over, there is a high likelihood the losing party will appeal, costing a couple million more.

Apple's lawyers are absolutely more expensive than the ones in the lawsuit my friend is involved in. And then there's the staff time spent dealing with discovery. (Imagine you are an engineer working on Siri and get an email from your boss "we need copies of any email or iMessage you sent from 2014-2024 regarding Siri. Oh, and copies of any notes you took at any meeting about Siri." All the time you're dealing with that you're not working. Then there is the staff time for those people to get deposed (which involves hours of lawyer and staff time to prepare for); for Apple leadership to get deposed (same preparation required), etc. How many engineers? How many managers? How many contracting officers overseeing the third-parties who had access to the data? Apple, we need see your privacy training for staff working on Siri, and the training you developed for third-party contractors, etc. etc. etc.

And yes, if Apple were to prevail, they could conceivably get their money back, but 1) it's not guaranteed 2) they wouldn't get staff time responding to discovery/preparing for depositions back, and 3) as @ChrisA pointed out, there are potential unknown issues (what if during discovery it becomes apparent that one third-party contractor did record and emailed it to his personal email - Apple had no idea but now they're liable. Or a Siri engineer said "you know, we should send Siri requests to google - maybe they'll pay us another $20 billion" as a joke but it's not interpreted as one. Then the inevitable appeal of whichever side loses.

I am confident Apple was not doing what they were accused of doing, but I am also confident that for Apple to accept the repetitional hit that they are taking by settling on this, they are convinced the cost to defend themselves is orders of magnitude higher than $95 million.