Apple denies rumors that it has ever allowed advertisers to target users based on Siri records in a statement released Wednesday night that describes how Siri works and what it does with the data.
The conspiracy theory to which the company is responding resurfaced last week after Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit over users whose conversations were intercepted by Siri’s voice assistant and possibly overheard by company employees.
Apple’s agreement resolves a problem that The Guardian reported in 2019. The report showed that contractors tasked with reviewing anonymous recordings and assessing whether a trigger was activated intentionally sometimes received recordings of people discussing sensitive information. But there is no mention of selling the data for marketing purposes.
Following a report by The Guardian in 2019, Apple apologized and changed its policy, making the default setting not to save audio recordings of Siri interactions and stating that for users who agree to share recordings, those recordings will not be shared with third-party contractors.
However, settlement reports note that in previous lawsuits similar to this one filed in 2021, some plaintiffs claimed that after they mentioned brands such as Olive Garden, Easton bats, Pit Viper sunglasses, and Air Jordans, they were shown ads for related products that they linked to Siri data.
In today’s statement, Apple said that the company “does not store audio recordings of interactions with Siri unless users explicitly consent to help improve Siri, and even then, the recordings are used solely for that purpose. Users can easily opt out at any time.”
Facebook responded to similar theories in 2014 and 2016, until Mark Zuckerberg addressed it directly by saying “no” to the question during a congressional questioning over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.
So, if Apple (and Facebook, Google, etc.) is telling the truth, why are you seeing ads for something that they have only talked about?
There are other explanations, and attempts to verify these rumors include a 2018 investigation that found no evidence of microphone spying, but did find that some apps were secretly recording users’ screen activity, which they shared with third parties.
Media networks also track the data of people who have logged on to the same network or spent time in the same places, so even if one person didn’t enter that search query, someone else may have. They can buy data from brokers who collect a lot of detailed location data and other information from the apps on your phone, and Google and Facebook get data from other companies to create profiles based on your shopping habits and other information.
