Image: © misu/Stock.adobe.com
Apple made the statement a week after settling the 2019 lawsuit on Siri’s monitoring of private audio.
In a statement published on 8 January, Apple claimed that it has never used Siri data for marketing, or sold it for any purpose.
Wednesday’s statement comes a week after the company settled a class action lawsuit for $95m on its monitoring of private audio via Siri, and refutes claims that the company ever sold Siri’s data to anyone.
An Apple spokesperson also reiterated the claims to SiliconRepublic.com on Monday (6 January).
The company’s statement also says that 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”, adding that “users can easily opt out at any time”.
The now settled class action lawsuit against Apple was filed in 2019 following reporting from The Guardian which aired concerns from a company whistleblower who claimed that contract workers would listen to small portions of recordings made by Siri to grade the virtual assistant’s responses to queries – adding that those recordings were often triggered by accident.
The whistleblower said that contractors working for Apple had overheard audio including “confidential medical information, drug deals and recordings of couples having sex”.
At the time, Apple said that Siri’s responses were “analysed in secure facilities” and that all reviewers were under strict obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements. However, months later, 300 contract workers from the Cork-based firm GlobeTech, who were employed by Apple as ‘graders’ to train and improve Siri, were let go.
Moreover, plaintiffs, in a document from 2021 filed as part of the lawsuit, claimed that “private conversations” were “used” by Apple and its partners to “target” advertisements to them.
It added that different brand names which were used in private conversations by the plaintiffs later showed up in Apple’s search results, its Safari browser and third-party applications. The plaintiffs claimed that they never searched for the items prior to the targeted advertisements.
Although, Apple has maintained throughout the legal battle that it never used recordings made by Siri to target advertisements for users, and claimed that there has been no evidence to suggest otherwise.
The company spokesperson told SiliconRepublic.com on Monday that it settled the lawsuit to “to avoid additional litigation” and “move forward from concerns about third-party grading that we [Apple] already addressed in 2019”.
According to Apple’s advertising and privacy policies, its ad platform does not track users, but, the information it “may use” to deliver ads includes a user’s name, address, age, gender and devices registered to their Apple Account, what a user downloads, purchases or subscribes to from the Apple App Store, a user’s interactions with ads delivered by the company’s ad platform, and a user’s App Store searches and browsing activity.
The class action lawsuit against Apple affected major players in the industry including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, which came under scrutiny after admitting that recordings of user voice interactions with their software were in some cases stored and analysed by human reviewers.
Moreover, in 2022, a similar lawsuit was filed against Google which alleges that its voice assistant recorded user communications even when a user did not intentionally trigger the assistant with the “Okay Google” command or manually activate it on their device.
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