“There are things known and there are things unknown and in between are the doors of perception.” — Aldous Huxley

I’m Huxley Westemeier (26’) and welcome to “The Sift,” a weekly opinions column focused on the impacts and implications of new technologies.

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What do you think of when you hear the word “Siri”? A powerful AI-enabled virtual assistant that can answer any question you have? Or a dysfunctional, glitchy, shimmering rainbow circle that tells you it can’t help with that? Apple would like you to believe it’s the first option, especially with the recent release of Apple Intelligence and upcoming Siri/ChatGPT integration features. I’ll let you decide if Siri is helpful, but there’s another reason Siri is relevant this week. Apple, a company that prides itself on Siri being “protected by the strongest privacy of any intelligent assistant,” must now pay out a $95 million lawsuit surrounding Siri listening (read: spying) on users without their permission.

The lawsuit claims that Siri shared voice recordings with advertisers, which Apple has firmly denied. Any person who classifies as covered by the settlement (after a Californian federal judge approves it) could receive $20 per device Siri was secretly activated on for up to five devices (a total payout of $100). This could be a big deal- Apple might be accused of violating wiretapping laws- but they have firmly denied all accusations. The main argument from the plaintiff states that both the plaintiff and their daughter received ‘targeted’ ads surrounding Nike’s Air Jordans after discussing Air Jordans in conversation. Still, there’s no credible proof that Siri was responsible.

Before anyone jumps to conclusions (and I’ll update in a future article if any further information is released), I think reviewing how Siri ‘listens’ is essential. Contrary to popular belief, the assistant isn’t using the microphone and recording every word you say. Input from the microphone is fed through a Deep Neural Network- a machine learning model– that is directly trained on a large dataset of recordings of people saying “Hey Siri.” Here’s a good analogy: pretend you’re listening to someone speaking a language you can’t understand. You probably won’t understand much unless they say a word in a language you’re fluent in. Apple’s DNN algorithm is always listening for a language where the only words are “Hey Siri” and nothing else. It’s true that once Siri hears “Hey Siri,” it starts recording your voice, but those recordings are (or should be) only shared with Apple to improve their models. A situation with the Nike Air Jordans could theoretically only happen if you were directly conversing with Siri about the shoes- since the DNN algorithm cannot understand anything you say unless it’s “Hey” or “Siri.”

If you’re uncomfortable with Siri listening to you, know that it can’t record the words you are saying until you activate it. You can simply disable Siri in settings or choose not to use the assistant.

I personally think Siri’s still a dysfunctional, glitchy, shimmering rainbow circle that tells me it can’t help with that- no matter the lawsuit. After all, if it were listening and recording conversations, wouldn’t you expect it to be more useful by now?