The Human Rights NGO of France, Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, accused Apple of privacy violations, illegal processing of misleading personal data and practice, as Radio France and Le Monde reported for the first time.
The privacy complaint is based on the information provided by a former employee who has allegedly shared evidence of the collection and mass processing of Siri’s voice recordings without the user’s consent.
The French complaint, presented to the Paris prosecutor on Thursday, February 13, 2025, occurs only a few weeks after the great technological giant agreed to pay $ 95 million in agreements for a similar demand in California, despite not admitting irregularities .
Invasion of privacy and rapes of GDPR
The Frenchman Thomas Le Bonniec began working for Globe Technical Services (GTS) in Cork, Ireland, in the spring of 2019. It was part of a team in charge of improving the response of Siri multilingual chatbot listening, transcribing and labeling the recordings caused by Apple’s vowel. assistant.
“The first day, they told us that we were going to work in recordings of people who spoke with their Siri assistant or in captured recordings without their knowledge when the machine was activated by mistake,” Le Bonniec told Radio France.
His work mainly involved verifying Siri’s transcripts to obtain precision and determine if they were accidental recordings. During his time in GTS, Le Bonniec said that he and his colleagues heard a considerable number of very private conversations triggered by error.
Some in the team, Le Bonniec explained, also had the task of labeling the tasks. “They had to compare the keywords pronounced during a recording and relate them to the data stored in the devices we had access, such as contacts, geolocation, music, movies, brands, etc. tagged these personal data with keywords,” he He, “He” He, “He” He, “” He “” He “” He “He” He “He” He “He” He “” He “He” He “He” “He” He “He” “. aggregate.
As consulted by the Radio France Research Unit, the LDH complaint accuses Apple’s practices to go against GDPR rules on data protection and informed consent.
The @LDH_Fer Duece CLAINTE APPLE ET are vocal assistant “Siri” Violation of the Vie Privée, Traitement Illicite des données Personnelles et Pratique Commercial Commercial Trompeuse. Patch Lire l’encête de Stéphane Par à Lire Dans are Intégralité ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/3mqy9b5p00February 14, 2025
Speaking to a French television channel, the president of LDH, Nathalie Tehio, said that the complaint focuses on two main crimes: the invasion of privacy through recordings without the consent of the people and the violation of the law of EU personal data protection.
“Not only is it spied on, it is recorded. You listen, record and even send,” Tehio said. “There is recording without people’s knowledge. This is an infraction. On the other hand, there is a violation of the GDPR, that is, the fact that we have not given our informed consent for this aspiration of personal data. These are two crimes,” .
Contacted by Techradar, an Apple spokesman pointed out how the French case is just a privacy complaint at the time of writing and no investigation has been opened.
Apple also explains that it made some changes in 2019 to ensure compliance with Siri with the company’s privacy commitment. These include no longer retain audio recordings from Siri interactions. Users can also choose not to allow Siri to improve from the audio samples of their applications.
According to Apple’s statement published in January 2025, “Apple has never used Siri data to create marketing profiles, never made it available to advertising and never sold it to anyone for any purpose. We are constantly developing technologies to do technologies That Siri is even more private, and will continue to do it. “
What follows?
If LDH’s complaint will open a broader investigation into Apple data management practices is too early to know with certainty.
As mentioned above, however, Apple is currently dealing with similar problems at home. California collective demand, López et al v. Apple Inc, accuses Siri to reveal private conversations to advertisers.
Despite not confirming such accusations, Apple decided to settle for $ 95 million “to avoid additional litigation so that we can advance the concerns about the third -party classification that we already headed in 2019,” said a company spokesman to Techradar in that moment.
Taking into account that, as shown in the investigation of one of the best providers of VPN Proton VPN, Big Tech needed less than three weeks this year to pay more than $ 8 billion in fines of 2024, the California demand agreement seems like Be ready to accumulate among the costs of doing business instead of having a real impact.
