PARIS — The Paris public prosecutor has opened an investigation into Apple regarding the collection of recordings by its voice assistant Siri, the prosecutor’s office told POLITICO.
The investigation, led by the country’s cybercrime agency OFAC, follows a complaint in February by the French NGO Ligue des droits de l’Homme, based on the testimony of a whistleblower and former employee of an Apple subcontractor Thomas Le Bonniec.
As an employee of Globe Technical Services in Ireland in 2019, Le Bonniec analyzed recordings made by Siri to improve the quality of the voice assistant’s responses. That involved listening to thousands of user recordings, which Le Bonniec said could reveal intimate moments and confidential information, and could be used to identify users.
The probe should enable “urgent questions to be answered,” Le Bonniec told POLITICO. Among them, “how many recordings in total have been made by Apple since 2014? How many people are affected? Where is this data stored?” he said.
An Apple representative in France told POLITICO, “Apple has never used Siri data to create marketing profiles, has never made it available for advertising and has never sold it to anyone for any reason whatsoever.”
Le Bonniec brought the case to the French prosecutor after unsuccessfully appealing to data protection authorities. That included France’s CNIL and its Irish counterpart, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), the responsible authority for American tech giants under EU privacy law. The DPC closed a case in 2022 without opening an investigation.
The February complaint also paved the way for an ongoing class action in France. That was inspired by a class action in the United States, which saw Apple accused of recording private conversations without consumers’ knowledge. Apple agreed in December 2024 to settle the case for $95 million. The company denied any wrongdoing.
In a blog post in January, Apple said it would not keep “audio recordings of interactions with Siri, unless the user explicitly agrees.”
The post Paris prosecutor opens investigation into Apple’s voice assistant Siri appeared first on Politico.
