Apple probed in Korea for allegedly spying on users through Siri

Korea's review of Apple targets Siri's potential privacy law violations after a $95 million U.S. settlement for similar accusations.

Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi speaks about Siri at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in California in 2018. [AP/YONHAP]

Korea is reviewing whether Apple broke consumer privacy laws with its voice assistant Siri, targeting the U.S. tech giant just days after it agreed to a $95 million settlement to a similar accusation on its home turf.

“'We are currently looking into whether Siri violated relevant regulations during its voice collection procedures,” the Personal Information Protection Commission said Wednesday in a statement. “We will begin an official investigation if they are deemed to violate any regulations.”

The move comes five days after Apple agreed to settle a class action lawsuit in the United States, which argued that the tech giant had been listening to private conversations recorded through the accidental activation of Siri, and sharing those conversations with advertisers, without user consent.

Since 2014, owners of Apple products have been able to activate the company's voice assistant with the verbal command “Hey Siri,” which later became “Siri.” Many words, however, sound similar to “Siri,” making accidental activations common; Korean users frequently complained that news stories about Syria would rouse the bot.

Apple came under fire in 2019 after The Guardian reported that the company’s third-party contractors were regularly listening to customers’ recorded interactions with Siri. The report also claimed that Apple was storing and utilizing inadvertent voice recordings — that is, those recorded after the voice assistant had been accidentally activated. Some plaintiffs in the class action suit, filed after the 2019 Guardian report's publication, even claimed their phones had recorded them when they hadn't uttered Siri's name.

Apple, following the 2019 report, said it would “no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions” and “delete any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri.”

An iPhone screen displays the Siri option to share Siri audio data with Apple to improve its voice assistant [AP/YONHAP]

The company, while agreeing to pay $95 million to settle the case on Jan. 3 of this year, admitted to no “wrongdoing.” U.S.-based Apple users are entitled to up to $20 per Siri-enabled device — on the condition that they swear, under oath, that they accidentally activated Siri during a private conversation — per the settlement, which is still subject to judge approval.

Despite its U.S. scope, news of the settlement has spread across Korean media in the days since, placing pressure on the nation's authorities to mount a similar response.

Concerns about the security of Apple devices were raised on Naver Cafe community Asamo, which boasts 2.3 million users.

“They should be embarrassed to continue their advertisements about security and privacy,” a community comment read.

“Siri has been engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning,” Apple Korea said in a rare on-the-record statement regarding the allegations. “Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose.”

The company argued that it had agreed to settle the case “to avoid additional litigation so we can move forward from concerns about third-party grading that we already addressed in 2019.”

The tech company recently launched a beta version of Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI features that includes improvements to Siri and ChatGPT integration with the assistant. Apple has emphasized the privacy aspect of the suite throughout its release cycle, claiming that most queries will be processed on-device and that any data sent to Apple's own Private Cloud Compute servers will not be saved or shared with the company.

Apple CEO Tim Cook in London On Dec. 11 [AP/YONHAP]

BY CHO YONG-JUN [cho.yongjun1@joongang.co.kr]