For those who came in late, Jobs’ Mob paid $95 million settlement after it was discovered that Siri was listening to your private conversations and this data was being given to third parties without users’ consent.
Normally, in such cases, Apple denies doing anything wrong and goes very quiet, but it is clear that this story was getting out of hand pretty quickly and a rare press statement has been made.
Apple insists that it had never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose.
A 2021 filing from the same lawsuit detailed how plaintiffs reported conversing about specific brands, such as "Air Jordans" and "Olive Garden. " Then, they saw targeted ads for those brands appear in Apple Safari and third-party apps. This led the plaintiffs' lawyers to conclude that Apple must have sold those Siri recordings to advertisers.
However, while Apple acknowledged giving Siri recordings to third-party contractors for quality control testing, the tech giant vehemently denies ever selling Siri data for targeted advertising.
Jobs’ Mob said that it had changed its policy for Siri quality control testing, making it opt-in by default and sharing minimal anonymised Siri data only with Apple employees.
"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. Users can easily opt-out at any time," said the statement.
The Tame Apple Press seems happy with that. One wrote ads target people in the same network or in proximity. So, if you were talking about Air Jordans with a friend because they happened to have just purchased a pair, you might get a targeted ad because of granular location tracking data.
However, is not what happened. Apple normally would take such cases to the highest court in the land and this case back peddled quickly. It might have been that the discovery process for the case might have revealed that information by a third party contractor was being sold, or otherwise misused.
