Apple says Siri isn’t sending your conversations to advertisers

The section specifically responding to the rumors reads:

Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose. We are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private, and will continue to do so.

After The Guardian’s report in 2019, Apple apologized and changed its policy, making the default setting not to retain audio recordings from Siri interactions and saying that for users who opt-in to sharing recordings, those recordings would not be shared with third-party contractors.

However, reports about the settlement noted that in earlier filings like this one from 2021, some of the plaintiffs claimed that after they mentioned brand names like “Olive Garden,” “Easton bats,” “Pit Viper sunglasses,” and “Air Jordans,” they were served ads for corresponding products, which they attributed to Siri data.

Apple’s statement tonight says it “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.”

Facebook responded to similar theories in 2014 and 2016 before Mark Zuckerberg addressed it directly, saying “no” to the question while being grilled by Congress over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.

So, if Apple (and Facebook, Google, etc.) is telling the truth, then why would you see an ad later for something you only talked about?

There are other explanations, and attempts to check the rumors out include an investigation in 2018 that didn’t find evidence of microphone spying but did discover that some apps secretly recorded on-screen user activity that they shipped to third parties.