
Apple denies using Siri recordings to serve targeted ads
In context: It’s a phenomenon that has been around since the beginning of the modern era of technology: seeing an advertisement for a product, usually on social media, that you were recently talking about. This is often blamed on companies that record conversations and send them to advertisers. Now Apple has denied rumors that it is doing this using Siri.
Apple published mail yesterday (January 8), emphasizing its commitment to user privacy, especially when it comes to Siri.
“Apple has never used Siri data to create marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and has never sold it to anyone for any purpose,” it said.
The situation arose due to a five-year-old lawsuit that Apple paid $95 million agreed last week. He accused Siri of eavesdropping on people’s private conversations on iPhones and other devices since 2014. The Cupertino giant was also accused of recording conversations even when the trigger phrase “Hey Siri” was not used.
In 2019, anonymous source disclosed that quality assurance auditors regularly heard parts of pseudonymised private conversations and people having sex while listening to Siri recordings. The quality assurance contractors’ job was to evaluate Siri’s interaction on various aspects, including whether the activation was intentional or accidental, whether it was a request that Siri could handle, and whether its response was appropriate. Apple modified its policy a week later, promising not to retain audio recordings or, for those who agreed, to share them with outside contractors.
Plaintiffs in the case accused Apple of sharing data from those recordings with advertisers to target ads based on what they said.
Settlement notes In earlier lawsuits, plaintiffs alleged that after mentioning brands like Olive Garden and Air Jordans in conversations, they were shown ads for those products, which they attributed to inadvertent Siri recordings.
Apple continues to insist it did nothing wrong, but some believe the $95 million payment is an admission of guilt, which is what led the company to release its statement. He claims that Siri does as much processing as possible on the device, but some features require real-time input from Apple servers. In these cases, Siri uses as little data as possible to produce an accurate result, and searches and requests are not associated with users’ Apple accounts.
“Apple does not save audio recordings of interactions with Siri unless users explicitly agree to help improve Siri, and even then the recordings are used solely for that purpose,” the company explains.
This isn’t the first time the tech giant has had to deny reports that it is running targeted ads based on people secretly recording. Facebook reported in 2017 that he never engaged in this practice. CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeated denial to Congress a year later, although the company admitted in 2019 that contractors were transcript Voice recording in instant messengers.
Heading: Omid Armin
2025-01-09 12:43:00