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Comment by tinus_hn | Hacker News Reader

All Apple devices that support Hi Siri play a notification and display lights or a UI when it activates and starts sending data outside of the device. I don’t see what more they can do.

Of course a device that listens for an activation phrase is going to listen. And it’s never going to be 100% accurate. If you can’t accept that, just set it up so it only starts listening when you press the button.

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I'll tell you what they can do and what they should have done. If, on your iOS device you go to Privacy > Analytics you will find this: https://imgur.com/a/LTV9bGc

Where Apple explicitly asks you whether you are willing for your data to be used to improve a variety of services and you can opt-in or opt out. Apple dropped the ball by not specifically including Siri as a separate item in the list. Bad Apple.

But Apple cares about user privacy! /s

So because some things are optional, everything has to be optional. Too bad that’s just not how it works. If you don’t want Apple to process the data you send to Siri your option is to turn off the service.

Here’s a little ‘secret’, you can’t use the location service either without Apple processing you data for analysis. If you don’t want that, your option is to turn off location services.

The explicit consent request is what they can do. It should have been there from the start, but better late than never.

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