How Private Are Your Conversations With Siri?

Back in 2021, Apple announced iOS 15, the latest update to its mobile operating system. Among a slew of changes, the company’s cheerful employees announced some privacy improvements to Siri during Apple’s annual World Wide Developer’s Conference

“Today we’re introducing on-device speech recognition. This means that, by default, your audio is all processed right on your iPhone or iPad,” said Katie Skinner, Apple’s manager of user privacy software. “This addresses the biggest privacy concern we hear for voice assistants, which is unwanted audio recording.”

What Apple didn’t mention is that while your audio recordings may not leave your phone, transcripts of your conversations always do. Skip Apple’s flashy video presentation and head to the privacy policy. There, you’ll learn that “In all cases, transcripts of your interactions will be sent to Apple to process your requests.”

Should you be worried about this? Not necessarily. There’s no reason to assume Apple engineers are going to be pouring over your chats with Siri. But it’s another instance where Apple’s practices aren’t quite as private as you might think at first glance. One privacy-minded reader wrote into Gizmodo to complain about this issue. He bought a new iPhone specifically for the on-device Siri processing. But when he realized Apple can learn just about anything it wants to know about his voice assistant usage, he decided he wasn’t comfortable using Siri after all.