France’s Human Rights NGO, Ligue des Droits de l’homme, has accused Apple of privacy, illegal treatment of personal data and misleading commercial practice, first reported by Radio France and Le Monde.
Privacy’s complaint is based on information from a former employee who allegedly shared evidence of the massive collection and processing of Siri’s voting recordings without user consent.
The French complaint – filed with the Paris Prosecutor on Thursday, February 13, 2025 – comes only weeks after the Big Tech giant agreed to pay $ 95 million in settlements for a similar California trial, despite not that not that have admitted wrongdoing.
Invasion of privacy and GDPR cravings
Frenchman Thomas Le Bonniec began an assistant.
“On the very first day, we were told that we had to work on recordings of people who talked to their assistant Siri or on recordings caught without their knowledge when the machine was triggered by mistake,” Le Bonniec told Radio France.
His job involved mainly checking Siris transcriptions for accuracy and determining whether they were unintended recordings. During his time at GTS, Le Bonniec said he and his colleagues listened to a significant number of very private conversations that were triggered by mistake.
Some in the team, Le Bonniec explained, was also tasked with labeling tasks. “They had to compare the keywords that were spoken during a recording and relate them to the data stored on the devices that we had access to, such as contacts, geolocation, music, movies, brands, etc. They labeled This personal data with keywords, “He added.
As heard by Radio France’s Investigation Unit, LDH’s complaint accuses Apple’s practice of going against GDPR rules on data protection and informed consent.
La @ldh_fr Dépose plainte Contre apple A son Assisting vocal “Siri” Pour violation de la vie privée, drawing illicite des données personnels a pratique commercial trumpuse. Pour lire l’Enquête de stéphane pair à lire dance son intégralité ⬇ pic.twitter.com/3mqy9b5p00February 14, 2025
When he spoke with a French TV channel, LDH President Nathalie Tehio said the complaint focuses on two main violations: the invasion of privacy through recordings made without individuals’ consent and violation of the EU’s personal data protection law.
“It’s not just spying on, it’s busy. There’s listening, recording and even sending,” Tehio said. “There is admission without people’s knowledge. This is a violation. On the other hand, there is a violation of GDPR, that is, the fact that we have not given our informed consent to this ambition of personal data. These are two crimes.”
Apple, contacted by Techradar, explained that it made some changes in 2019 to ensure Siris compliance with the company’s privacy obligation. These no longer include preserving audio recordings of SIRI interactions. Users can also sign up or opt out of letting Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests.
According to Apple’s statement published in January 2025, “Apple has never used SIRI data to build marketing profiles, never made them available for advertising and never sold it to anyone for any purpose. We are constantly developing technologies to do Siri even more private, and will continue to do so.
What is the next?
Whether the LDH complaint opens a wider study of Apple’s data management practice is too early to know for sure.
However, as mentioned earlier, Apple is currently employing similar problems at home. California’s class case, Lopez et al. Apple Inc, accuses Siri of revealing private conversations to advertisers.
Despite not confirming such claims, Apple decided to settle for $ 95 million “to avoid further litigation so that we can move forward from concerns about third -party classification that we have already dealt with in 2019,” a spokesman said for the company to Techradar at the time.
Given that, as research from one of the best VPN providers Proton VPN shows, Big Tech needed less than three weeks this year to pay over $ 8 billion in 2024 fines it seems to California – trial to do business rather than to have a real influence.
