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I wrote about this previously: (https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/#facebook-dont-spy-microphone) Facebook don\u2019t spy on you through your microphone . (Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn\u2019t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there\u2019s nothing you can do to talk them out of it. Gimlet media did (https://gimletmedia.com/amp/shows/reply-all/z3hlwr) a great podcast episode about how impossible this is back in 2017.) This is about to get even harder thanks to this proposed settlement: (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-pay-95m-delete-private-conversations-siri-recorded/) Siri \u201cunintentionally\u201d recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M (Ars Technica). Apple are spending $95m (nine hours of profit), agreeing to settle while \u201cdenying wrongdoing\u201d. What actually happened is it turns out Apple were capturing snippets of audio surrounding the \u201cHey Siri\u201d wake word, sending those back to their servers and occasionally using them for QA, without informing users that they were doing this. This is bad. The Reuters 2021 story (https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-must-face-siri-voice-assistant-privacy-lawsuit-us-judge-2021-09-02/) Apple must face Siri voice assistant privacy lawsuit -U.S. judge reported that: One Siri user said his private discussions with his doctor about a \u201cbrand name surgical treatment\u201d caused him to receive targeted ads for that treatment, while two others said their discussions about Air Jordan sneakers, Pit Viper sunglasses and \u201cOlive Garden\u201d caused them to receive ads for those products. The claim from that story was then repeated in (https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-siri-privacy-lawsuit-2025-01-02/) the 2025 Reuters story about the settlement. The (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-pay-95m-delete-private-conversations-siri-recorded/) Ars Technica story reframes that like this: The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri\u2019s alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden, Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-siri-privacy-lawsuit-2025-01-02/) noted . Crucially, this was never proven in court . And if Apple settle the case it never will be. Let\u2019s think this through. For the accusation to be true, Apple would need to be recording those wake word audio snippets and transmitting them back to their servers for additional processing (likely true), but then they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks such that next time you view an ad on your phone the information is available to help select the relevant ad. That is so far fetched . Why would Apple do that? Especially given both their brand and reputation as a privacy-first company combined with the large amounts of product design and engineering work they\u2019ve put into preventing apps from doing exactly this kind of thing by enforcing permission-based capabilities and ensuring a \u201cmicrophone active\u201d icon is available at all times when an app is listening in. I really don\u2019t think this is happening\u2014in particular for Siri wake words! I\u2019ve (https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/#facebook-dont-spy-microphone) argued these points before , but I\u2019ll do it again here for good measure. You don\u2019t notice the hundreds of times a day you say something and don\u2019t see a relevant advert a short time later. You see thousands of ads a day, can you remember what any of them are? The tiny fraction of times where you see an ad that\u2019s relevant to something you\u2019ve just said (hence breaking through your filter that prevents you from seeing most ads at all) stick in your head. Human beings are pattern matching machines with a huge bias towards personal anecdotes. If we\u2019ve seen direct evidence of something ourselves, good luck talking us out of it! I think the truth of the matter here is much more pedestrian: the quality of ad targeting that\u2019s possible just through apps sharing data on your regular actions within those apps is shockingly high... combined with the fact that it turns out just knowing \u201cmale, 40s, NYC\u201d is often more than enough\u2014we\u2019re all pretty basic! I fully expect that this Apple story will be used as \u201cproof\u201d by conspiracy theorists effectively forever. Posted (/2025/Jan/2/) 2nd January 2025 at 11:43 pm \u00b7 Follow me on (https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon) Mastodon , (https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net) Bluesky , (https://twitter.com/simonw) Twitter or (https://simonwillison.net/about/#subscribe) subscribe to my newsletter More recent articles (/2025/Dec/12/openai-skills/) OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI - 12th December 2025 (/2025/Dec/11/gpt-52/) GPT-5.2 - 11th December 2025 (/2025/Dec/10/html-tools/) Useful patterns for building HTML tools - 10th December 2025 This is I still don\u2019t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone by Simon Willison, posted on (/2025/Jan/2/) 2nd January 2025 . 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(https://github.com/sponsors/simonw/) Sponsor & subscribe (/about/#about-site) Colophon \u00a9 (/2002/) 2002 (/2003/) 2003 (/2004/) 2004 (/2005/) 2005 (/2006/) 2006 (/2007/) 2007 (/2008/) 2008 (/2009/) 2009 (/2010/) 2010 (/2011/) 2011 (/2012/) 2012 (/2013/) 2013 (/2014/) 2014 (/2015/) 2015 (/2016/) 2016 (/2017/) 2017 (/2018/) 2018 (/2019/) 2019 (/2020/) 2020 (/2021/) 2021 (/2022/) 2022 (/2023/) 2023 (/2024/) 2024 (/2025/) 2025 " ], "output": "htmltotext.txt", "pwd": "/data/archive/1765637427.617845", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-12-13T14:51:08.886702+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "media": [ { "cmd": [ "/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp", "--restrict-filenames", "--trim-filenames", "128", "--write-description", "--write-info-json", "--write-annotations", "--write-thumbnail", "--no-call-home", "--write-sub", "--write-auto-subs", "--convert-subs=srt", "--yes-playlist", "--continue", "--no-abort-on-error", "--ignore-errors", "--geo-bypass", "--add-metadata", "--format=(bv*+ba/b)[filesize<=750m][filesize_approx<=?750m]/(bv*+ba/b)", "--skip-download", "--cache-dir=/data/yt-dlp-cache/", "--cookies=/data/yt-dlp-cache/cookies.txt", "--proxy=socks5://tor-socks-proxy:9150", "--no-playlist", "https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/" ], "cmd_version": "2024.10.7", "end_ts": "2025-12-13T14:51:15.671027+00:00", "index_texts": [], "output": "media/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1765637427.617845", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-12-13T14:51:10.946138+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/home/archivebox/.npm/bin/postlight-parser", "https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/" ], "cmd_version": "2.2.3", "end_ts": "2025-12-13T14:51:08.852133+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1765637427.617845", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-12-13T14:51:05.764511+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/home/archivebox/.npm/bin/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpmfkiclj_", "https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2025-12-13T14:50:53.973935+00:00", "index_texts": [ "I still don\u2019t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone\n2nd January 2025\n\n\n\nOne of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone\u2019s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a conspiracy theory that isn\u2019t true. I wrote about this previously: Facebook don\u2019t spy on you through your microphone.\n(Convincing people of this is basically impossible. It doesn\u2019t matter how good your argument is, if someone has ever seen an ad that relates to their previous voice conversation they are likely convinced and there\u2019s nothing you can do to talk them out of it. Gimlet media did a great podcast episode about how impossible this is back in 2017.)\nThis is about to get even harder thanks to this proposed settlement: Siri \u201cunintentionally\u201d recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M (Ars Technica).\nApple are spending $95m (nine hours of profit), agreeing to settle while \u201cdenying wrongdoing\u201d.\nWhat actually happened is it turns out Apple were capturing snippets of audio surrounding the \u201cHey Siri\u201d wake word, sending those back to their servers and occasionally using them for QA, without informing users that they were doing this. This is bad.\nThe Reuters 2021 story Apple must face Siri voice assistant privacy lawsuit -U.S. judge reported that:\n\nOne Siri user said his private discussions with his doctor about a \u201cbrand name surgical treatment\u201d caused him to receive targeted ads for that treatment, while two others said their discussions about Air Jordan sneakers, Pit Viper sunglasses and \u201cOlive Garden\u201d caused them to receive ads for those products.\n\nThe claim from that story was then repeated in the 2025 Reuters story about the settlement.\nThe Ars Technica story reframes that like this:\n\nThe only clue that users seemingly had of Siri\u2019s alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden, Reuters noted.\n\nCrucially, this was never proven in court. And if Apple settle the case it never will be.\nLet\u2019s think this through. For the accusation to be true, Apple would need to be recording those wake word audio snippets and transmitting them back to their servers for additional processing (likely true), but then they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks such that next time you view an ad on your phone the information is available to help select the relevant ad.\nThat is so far fetched. Why would Apple do that? Especially given both their brand and reputation as a privacy-first company combined with the large amounts of product design and engineering work they\u2019ve put into preventing apps from doing exactly this kind of thing by enforcing permission-based capabilities and ensuring a \u201cmicrophone active\u201d icon is available at all times when an app is listening in.\nI really don\u2019t think this is happening\u2014in particular for Siri wake words!\n\nI\u2019ve argued these points before, but I\u2019ll do it again here for good measure.\n\nYou don\u2019t notice the hundreds of times a day you say something and don\u2019t see a relevant advert a short time later. You see thousands of ads a day, can you remember what any of them are?\nThe tiny fraction of times where you see an ad that\u2019s relevant to something you\u2019ve just said (hence breaking through your filter that prevents you from seeing most ads at all) stick in your head.\nHuman beings are pattern matching machines with a huge bias towards personal anecdotes. If we\u2019ve seen direct evidence of something ourselves, good luck talking us out of it!\n\nI think the truth of the matter here is much more pedestrian: the quality of ad targeting that\u2019s possible just through apps sharing data on your regular actions within those apps is shockingly high... combined with the fact that it turns out just knowing \u201cmale, 40s, NYC\u201d is often more than enough\u2014we\u2019re all pretty basic!\nI fully expect that this Apple story will be used as \u201cproof\u201d by conspiracy theorists effectively forever." ], "output": "readability/", "pwd": "/data/archive/1765637427.617845", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-12-13T14:50:51.607836+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "/usr/bin/curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--proxy", "socks5://tor-socks-proxy:9150", "--max-time", "60", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/{VERSION} (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/)", "https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/" ], "cmd_version": "8.10.1", "end_ts": "2025-12-13T14:50:50.560953+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "I still don\u2019t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone", "pwd": "/data/archive/1765637427.617845", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2025-12-13T14:50:50.537437+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": "TimeoutExpired: Command '['/usr/bin/curl', '--silent', '--location', '--compressed', '--proxy', 'socks5://tor-socks-proxy:9150', '--head', '--max-time', '60', '--user-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/{VERSION} (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/)', 'https://web.archive.org/save/https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/']' timed out after 60 seconds", "dom": "output.html", "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": "media/", "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "I still don\u2019t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone", "warc": null, "wget": null }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1765637427.617845", "newest_archive_date": "2025-12-13T14:51:15.785017+00:00", "num_failures": 1, "num_outputs": 8, "oldest_archive_date": "2025-12-13T14:50:34.109803+00:00", "path": "/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_abid": "snp_01KCC324SK4A66D03A01DMMCSK", "snapshot_id": "8f11f2ad-32d6-45dc-a378-785c5b4a3333", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1765637426-import.txt" ], "tags": null, "tags_str": "", "timestamp": "1765637427.617845", "title": "I still don\u2019t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone", "url": "https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/" }