Siri, the vocal assistant on the Apple phones, in the center of a France's prosecutor's office that should bring “answers to urgent questions”

The Prosecutor General of Paris has opened an investigation targeting the American giant of Apple technology in relation to the collection of records by his vocal assistant, confirmed the Parisian Prosecutor's Office for Politico.

The investigation, led by the National Agency for Combating Computer Crime (OFAC), comes from a complaint filed in February by the French NGO Ligue des Droits de L'Homme (“Human Rights League”), based on the testimony of a denouncer and a employee of a subcontractor Apple, Thomas Le Bonniec.

As an employee of Globe Technical Services in Ireland, in 2019, Le Bonniec analyzed the records made by Siri to improve the quality of the vocal assistant responses.

The analysis involved listening to thousands of users audio recordings, which, according to Le Bonniec, could disclose intimate moments and confidential information and could be used to identify these users.

The investigation should bring “answers to urgent questions,” said Le Bonniec for the publication in Brussels. These include issues such as “how many records have been made in total by Apple in 2014? How many people are affected? Where are this data stored?” He said.

A representative in France of the American company based in Cupertino, California, said for Politico: “Apple has never used the Siri data to create marketing profiles, has never provided them for advertising and has never sold it to anyone, for any reason.”

Le Bonniec notified the French Prosecutor's Office after successfully appealed to the data protection authorities. These include CNIL from France and the similar agency in Ireland, the Data Protection Commission (DPC). DPC is the authority responsible for American technological giants in accordance with EU confidentiality legislation. DPC closed a file on this topic in 2022 without starting an investigation.

The February 2025 complaint opened the way for a collective action that is currently ongoing in France. It was inspired by a collective action in the United States, in which Apple was accused of registering private conversations without the knowledge of its customers. Apple accepted in December 2024 to settle the case for $ 95 million. The US giant at that time denied any violation of the law.

In a January blog post, Apple said that it will not keep “audio recordings of Siri interactions, unless the user explicitly agrees.”