Siri "unintentionally" recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M

It&#x27;s hard to trust Apple to keep their word on privacy when an &quot;accidental&quot; Siri activation potentially results in that recording (or related data) finding its way not just to Apple for, say, speech recognition, but all the way to advertisers.<p>Transparency would be appreciated here, Apple. Is there any ability for a user to review all recordings made and submitted to Siri? I want to say that Android has this ability via Google Takeout.

I don&#x27;t know how to reason about things like this and the Google&#x27;s version with Street View recording wifi SSIDs. I wouldn&#x27;t at all be surprised if these really were just harmless mistakes, but people feel so constantly surveilled that they immediately attribute suspicion&#x2F;malice. Even this article is in scare quotes.

Wait, if Siri was “accidentally” activated to listen to our voices then does the led light up or not?

Our phones are definitely listening and serving ads based on what we say. I have personally experienced it. Most of us have if we are paying attention.<p>It seems like we don’t want to face this because the only remedy is to throw our phones off a cliff.

I&#x27;ve argued ad nauseum with HN&#x27;ers that tech companies are actually listening to us, and about 95% of the time I get a response that such a thing would be a massive conspiracy theory, require too much throughput, and actually it&#x27;s the search history they&#x27;re keeping track of, yada yada.<p>Yet the technology is indeed entirely there, and while this settlement does not admit wrongdoing, it certainly doesn&#x27;t detract from my point that they are actually listening to us and selling it to advertisers.<p>Meta got in trouble for reading private messages and using it for ad targeting a couple years ago.

I suspect this occurred to me multiple times over the last few years. I would seem to have ads on YouTube specifically related to vocal conversations I had with coworkers or family members, and far enough outside of my interests where the ads raised suspicion.<p>I was considering performing experiments to test if this was the case, but never got around to it. I wanted to be certain it wasn’t an instance of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.<p>More to the point, this is an incredible breach of privacy. The amounts noted in the article are pathetically small for such an intrusion, especially over the period of 10 years for impacted users.

How the hell is this not the top post?!