Your iPhone Might Have Secretly Recorded Siri Conversations
Apple confirmed a privacy bug in an early release of iOS 15 enabled the 'Improve Siri and Dictation' setting by default, causing recordings to be sent to the company without the users' knowledge. It's an unusual slip for the company that heavily prioritizes privacy in its mission and branding. For years, dating back to the late Steve Jobs' reign as CEO, Apple has viewed privacy as a human right. Its policy has been to ask users what data they wish to share with the company and others, and moreover, to keep asking continually as users provide data.
The 'Improve Siri and Dictation' setting is optional for all devices with the voice assistant. When enabled, it sends voice recordings to Apple's servers in order to improve Siri's understanding of user requests. Compared with other companies, Apple's sharing option is robust, even when it's allowed to send data to the company's servers. It maintains that recordings are not assigned to a specific user or account, protecting the user's privacy. Furthermore, some actions requested to Siri make use of on-device intelligence, which requires no communication with Apple's servers to respond to requests.
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Apple told The Verge that it identified the bug after the initial release of iOS 15 in September of 2021. The new version of iOS was unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last summer, and includes features that strengthened user privacy. It builds off the 'App Tracking Transparency' features introduced in the final release of iOS 14, and includes other implementations, like up-front privacy information in the App Store. However, the bug automatically enabled the "Improve Siri and Dictation' option
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