Certain requests made to Apple’s voice assistant are likely to be overheard by Apple contractors. It is, however, possible to prevent Siri from being prying on iPhone and iPad.
We discovered, at the beginning of the week, that conversations held with Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, are listened to by humans. The Californian company indeed calls on third-party companies to listen to the requests launched by users on Siri, in order to analyze its dysfunctions.
Faced with the fear raised by these revelations, the Cupertino company tried to reassure its customers, justifying that less than 1% of daily recordings were analyzed, and that it was not possible to identify the users at the origin of these queries.
But Apple’s voice assistant has an unfortunate tendency to trigger unexpectedly, when it believes it recognizes a phrase close to the command “Hey Siri”, in principle used to trigger it. Thus, the employees in charge of listening to these requests would have had access to conversations that should have been kept private, some of which were particularly embarrassing, such as a conversation between a doctor and his patient, or worse, during an intimate relationship.
If it is possible, on iPhone and iPad, to disable the Hey Siri function, used to wake up the voice assistant, there is another solution to prevent Apple from listening to your conversations without depriving you of the functionality.
Jan Kaiser, a security researcher, posted an iOS profile on Github that, when installed, turns off server-side query logging. Here’s how to do it.
1. Download the configuration profile
From your iPhone or iPad, open Safari and download the configuration profile.
A pop-up indicating that the site is trying to download a configuration profile is displayed. Tap Allow to complete the profile download, then tap Close in the download confirmation window.
2. Install the profile
Now open iOS Settings. Enter the Downloaded Profile menu where the profile with the name Prevent server-side logging of Siri commands should be located and press the Install button.
Enter the unlock code for your iPhone to authorize the installation, press Install twice to complete the operation, then press OK.
If no changes appear to be visible on your device, the requests you make on Siri will no longer be saved on Apple’s servers.
Finally, if you have a Mac, it is quite possible to generate the configuration profile yourself from the Apple Configurator application, available on the Mac App Store.