Comment by rgovostes

Reuters journalist Jon Stempel repeated the plaintiffs' paranoid and unsubstantiated allegations but did not include a single statement from Apple, just a vacant "did not immediately respond". If only there were years of statements made under oath in the courts to draw from.

Siri uses a pseudonymous identifier when communicating with Apple's services. The identifier is not linked to your Apple ID. Therefore Siri does not have access to your iCloud data. When you ask Siri to "call mom", it constructs a search query which is then executed on-device against your contacts database.

More of these requests are served entirely on-device. Just ask: how is that consistent with the idea that they are doing ad targeting based on Siri requests?

You can request a data export for your Apple account and see that there's no Siri data included in it. If they are caught lying, EU regulators will have a field day.

Apple describes their ad targeting here. They list the—frankly boring—signals they use for ad personalization, which does not include anything you say to Siri or have in your personal iCloud data. https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...

No one is apologizing for Apple's nontransparent collection of Siri audio for QA purposes, which is what they settled over and made opt-in.