Siri's Voice Recording Scandal Rises Again, France Opens New Investigation

JAKARTA - Apple is again facing an investigation into the collection of voice recordings by Siri's digital assistant, after the Paris Prosecutor's Office opened a new investigation into the events that have occurred since 2019.

This case began in 2019 when Apple was criticized for sending Siri user voice recordings to third parties working for the company for quality control purposes. Although it had subsided, now the French government has decided to re-investigate the practice.

The Paris Prosecutor's Office has started an official investigation into Apple's collection and handling of Siri's voice recordings. According to a Politico report, the investigation was led by the OFAC cybercrime agency, based on a complaint filed in February by French human rights organization Ligue des droits de l'Home.

The complaint was based on the testimony of Thomas Le Goodyc, the whistleblower who first exposed this practice and sparked a wave of criticism against Apple. Le airc is a contractor at the Globe Technical Services company in Ireland that handles Siri's voice recordings.

At the time, Apple claimed that voice recordings were collected to improve Siri's accuracy and response quality. Records that Siri cannot understand automatically will be anonymized and sent for analysis by contractors.

However, this scandal arose because several recordings contained private and sensitive conversations, including doctors discussing patient medical history or even intimate conversations, all of which were recorded because Siri was accidentally active.

Apple was also criticized for not clearly disclosing to users that part of the footage would be manually reviewed by third parties. Although Apple has mentioned that some Siri's requests can be manually reviewed, many see the company as less transparent in its explanation.

Le airc, who previously failed to ask for data protection authorities such as CNIL France and the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) to open an investigation, assessed that there were still urgent questions to answer. He urged Apple to reveal how many records have been collected since 2014, how many users have been affected, and where the data is stored.

In response to this report, Apple representatives confirmed that the company "never used Siri data to create marketing profiles, never shared them for advertising, and never sold them to any party."

In addition to this new investigation, Apple is also facing a class action lawsuit in France sparked by the complaint. The case appears to be inspired by a similar lawsuit in the United States which began in 2019 and ended in January 2025 with a settlement of US$95 million (around Rp1.55 trillion), with compensation of up to US$20 (around Rp326,600) per device supporting Siri.

However, Apple did not recognize any errors in the settlement. In January 2025, the company released Siri's privacy statement confirming that the iPhone does not "upload" users, that Apple's privacy commitment is not a tactic to collect data, and that the company does not sell user data in any form.