alt Hacker NewsI said this in another thread a while ago, and one of these people who thinks Apple isn’t on the side of privacy cited a lawsuit they settled around Siri listened to conversations: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apple-settles-cla...
People understood this settlement to mean Apple was spying on their conversations and selling them to advertisers, when it seems to have more to do with people accidentally triggering Siri. But people don’t care about this kind of nuance or actually tallying up all the ways Apple is pro privacy against rare issues like this one. It’s all just tribalism at the end of the day.
This is also a misunderstanding of the case, though. The suit wasn't filed because of accidental Siri triggers, it was filed because Apple never informed users that third-party contractors would be listening to retained recordings of accidental invocations. From the original Guardian report:
> Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
Regardless of how you feel towards Apple, this sort of data should be siloed in a way that makes it impossible to share with undisclosed third-parties. It also should not be shared anywhere until Apple can confirm that PII and other sensitive information was redacted from the data, which they did not. It generally points to a laissez-faire attitude towards personal data that is hard to abdicate without seeing the Siri server-side code or retention architecture, which is why Apple settled to avoid revealing the extent to which they retain and share data in a class-action discovery process. The settlement is a mea-culpa without admitting to wrongdoing or proving fundamental security.
The lawsuit was entirely avoidable if Apple didn't play fast-and-loose with production databases. It'll be a black eye for anyone that points to Apple's whitepapers as an example of their commitment to security - some retention simply doesn't get documented by Apple.