Last week, Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged “unlawful and intentional recording” of Siri interactions.
Apple’s settlement has led to a wave of conspiracy theories claiming that Siri is listening to you for targeted advertising, but the company says those claims are completely unfounded.
Siri’s privacy controversy
As a refresher, the lawsuit stemmed from a 2019 report in the Guardian that revealed Apple’s use of contractors to “grade” Siri interactions. The whistleblower in the story alleged that those contractors would regularly hear private interactions from users as part of their work providing “quality control” for Siri.
At the time, Apple quickly responded to the allegations by saying that “less than 1% of daily Siri activations” were used for “grading” and that those activations were typically only a few seconds long. The interactions were also bound by “Apple’s strict confidentiality agreement” and were not associated with a user’s Apple ID.
Apple also subsequently announced several changes to Siri’s privacy protections in a post on Apple Newsroom. The big change was that, by default, Apple no longer retained recordings of Siri interactions. Instead, users could opt-in to help Siri improve by “learning from the audio samples of their requests.” Apple also said that “only Apple employees” would be allowed to listen to audio samples of Siri interactions, not third-party contractors – and any recording that was “determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri” would be swiftly deleted.
Is your iPhone listening to you to show you ads? Nope.
Fast forward to 2025, and Apple agreed last week to settle that 2019 lawsuit with a $95 million payout to users. In a statement to 9to5Mac today, Apple said it settled the case so it can “move forward from concerns about third-party grading that we already addressed in 2019.”
The company says that Siri data has “never been used to build marketing profiles, and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose.”
Here is the full statement from an Apple spokesperson:
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.
Last week’s news spawned a number of unfounded conspiracy theories using Apple’s settlement as evidence that your iPhone is “always listening to you” and spying on you for means of targeted advertising. Apple tells me this is absolutely not the case, and what you share with Siri is never shared with advertisers.
Apple says it repeatedly denied allegations throughout the lawsuit that Siri recordings were used to target advertisements, and no evidence was presented to suggest otherwise.
In fact, Siri interactions are tied to a random identifier that lets Apple keep track of data during processing. Those interactions are not tied to your Apple Account, phone number, or any other identifying information. After six months, that request history is also unlinked from that random identifier. All of these details (and more) are emphasized on Apple’s website on a webpage dedicated to Siri and Dictation privacy.
Additionally, you can manually review and delete Siri transcripts directly in Settings. Just go to the Settings app and look for the “Siri & Dictation History” option.
Some Siri requests are also handled entirely on-device. For example, if you ask Siri to read unread messages, it does so by simply instructing your iPhone to read your messages aloud. The content of the message is not sent to Apple servers.
For Apple Intelligence features, Apple also emphasizes its use of Private Cloud Compute. Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure is built on its own Apple Silicon chips and is open to third-party researchers to ensure privacy protections.
9to5Mac’s Take
All this to say, the headlines making the rounds suggesting that this lawsuit is evidence your phone is “always listening to you” are nothing but unfounded conspiracy theories. In fact, it is quite literally impossible that your interactions with Siri are being used for targeted advertising with the privacy protections that Apple has put into place.
This, of course, doesn’t excuse Apple’s reactive rather than proactive approach to the situation that first arose in 2019. Apple should’ve had more privacy protections in place before then, and it shouldn’t have taken a whistleblower for it to respond. The system should’ve been opt-in from the start. Nonetheless, Apple has continued to double down on Siri’s privacy protections since then.
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