Apple has officially denied the claims of using its popular voice assistant Siri data for marketing and advertising purposes. Taking to a blog post, the company has stated that the company has been committed to making Siri private and will continue to do so. This comes after claims about Apple sharing data with third parties have surfaced online.
Taking to the blog post, the company stated, “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.”
Apple has also said that privacy is a fundamental component of the design process, driven by principles such as strong security protections, transparency and control, on-device intelligence, and data minimization, which combine to give users amazing experiences. The business also provided information about how Siri safeguards user data to refute the allegations.
According to the company, the purpose of Siri is to process as much data as possible on the user’s device in order to provide a personalized experience without disclosing any information to Apple servers. Regarding the information gathered for the Siri conversations, Apple claimed to take great care to minimize the amount of information collected. According to the company, Siri only gathers the bare minimum required to deliver accurate results.
The company said that a user’s personal phone number or Apple Account is not connected to Siri requests. Siri differs from other systems because Apple gives each device a random identifier, which is an anonymized string of letters and numbers that aids in processing data without connecting it to the user’s identity.
Additionally, Apple stated that it does not save audio recordings of user interactions unless the user specifically consents to share them in order to enhance Siri’s functionality. These recordings are only used for this purpose, even if users decide to share their audio. It further stated that users have complete control and can simply opt out at any moment.
With the Private Cloud Compute, a cutting-edge feature that enables Siri to access more potent cloud-based models while protecting user privacy, the company is also introducing new privacy safeguards. The data is kept private when Siri needs to process information that calls for sophisticated cloud computing.