Yes, Apple has been caught again. This time, for turning your friendly Siri, the “AI”with a deteriorating brain, into that neighbor who listens through the walls.
You know the one.
Well, it turns out, Siri was eavesdropping on things I didn’t even want my dachshund to hear.
Pillow talk.
Check.
Illegal side hustles?
Yup.
That awkward conversation with your doctor about toe fungus? Oh, definitely that one.
And all the while we have been led to believe that Siri only listens in, when you call her name. Like “hey Siri”. But apparently that is just a polite excuse if you want this snitch to do something for you. But for the rest of the time, she apparently was that “24/7 always on” microphone who sent each moan and groan to Cupertino. They must have been laughing all the way from my house to the server farm.
How Siri became Apple’s little snitch-bitch
A whistleblower blew the lid off Apple’s apparently not-so-private private assistant back in 2019. Siri was not waiting for “Hey Siri” to help you out. She was always listening, like that one creepy guy at the office.
You know who I’m talking about.
Apparently, Apple had contractors who were reviewing audio recordings that they had taken for “quality control”. Now, that to me, sounds innocent until you realize that those recordings included everything from my barking dog to my bedroom escapades.
Yes, Siri was picking up way more than it should, and all of that because it couldn’t tell the difference between a command and a cough. We all had no clue this was happening, of course, because why would Apple even bother to mention such a thing?
After all, who wouldn’t want their personal life being streamed to strangers for the sake of improving Apple’s ability to sell you overpriced accessories.
And now, Apple is coughing up $95 million in a settlement that has been dragging for a while. And now they are hoping that throwing cash at us will make us forget.
But will it?
Does $20 make up for years of eavesdropping? Not a chance.
So, you get a Jackson and a few pesky coins for every iPhone, iPad, and MacBook they turned into a cold war spy-bug.
It is almost insulting.
It feels just like if a burglar would steal my TV and left a gift card for a coffee and a croissant.
Suuure, Apple says it was all an accident. Siri was just “accidentaly” triggered.
Fumbling your zipper and a few wrist movements were enough to trigger her.
Yeah, sure, my fly sounds a lot like “Hey Siri”.
If that is the case, maybe they should have programmed her with ears that actually work. Because I still have to dictate and spell-out every command that I want her to do.
More anti big-tech sentiment after the brake:
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The Apple ecosystem of eavesdropping
There are a lot of Apple products who were equipped with Siri at the time. Essentially, anything that could summon Siri with a “Hey Siri” command was a potential Stasi enforcer.
So if you had one of these devices back in the day, I’d say – lineup for free coffee and doughnuts coming out of Tim’s piggy bank:
- iPhones. Always ready to “assist” but apparently sometimes a little too eager.
- iPads. It was supposed to be my productivity tool, but it is doubling as a wiretap.
- Apple Watches. Meant to track my “fitness” but apparently tracking my escapades, too.
- MacBooks and iMacs. Luckily I didn’t own any of them go-to devices for work back in the day.
- HomePods. You know, them smart home assistant to simplify your life. But it oversimplified my privacy, too.
- Apple TVs. Man! Even my streaming box wasn’t safe. It could listen in when connected to Siri remotes. Luckily Apple doesn’t stream p**n
..and the iPod touch, but who cares about that anymore.
So the entire Siri ecosystem was involved, like some huge spy ring. No nook or cranny of your Apple universe was off-limits. And now, Apple is trying to clean up shop by schlapping $20 on the betrayal, and they are kinda hoping you’ll forget all about it.
There’s nothing quite like realizing that the gadgets you love are out to ruin you. Siri wasn’t supposed to hear you unless you summoned her. Well, at least that was what mister turtleneck promised us back in the day. But, there she was, picking up background noise and logging it all on some server at Apple Park.
All hail to the whistleblower
For him, this all started as a job. Just a job. Simple.
Wear the headphones, listen to audio clips, and check if Siri did her job right. Now that’s what they called it: quality assurance. But to him it didn’t feel harmless for long. The clips were not the commands that people gave it, like “Set a timer for the explosion” or “Call my dealer”.
The clips were raw.
Real.
Private.
Lovers sharing confessions. A woman breaking down while talking to her doctor. Spouses (?) having sex. It wasn’t clean or professional, nor was he a scientist. He was just quality control. But if felt invasive, like standing in someone’s living room uninvited.
At first, the whistleblower tried to ignore it. Just do his work.
Mark it down. Move on.
But it wasn’t that simple anymore.
The recordings were unfiltered snapshots of lives, and moments that no one would want a stranger to hear. When he brought it up to his manager, the response was, of course, dismissive. “Just flag the explicit stuff. It’s no biggy”.
But it was a big deal. It still is.
These people didn’t know their most vulnerable moments were being funneled into a system and handed off to strangers for review.
The guilt grew too heavy for the man. He could not let it go.
So one night, he sent everything to a journalist. Anonymous. No name, no face, just evidence of the truth. Weeks went by in silence, and then the headlines exploded. “Apple contractors heard it all”. And “Siri’s privacy problem”. And the whistleblower faded into the background. He was no longer part of the machine.
At least he survived, whereas another whistleblower recently died under, let’s say “dubious” circumstances. Read: The curious case of Suchir Balaji | LinkedIn
Your photos aren’t safe either
Spying on your conversations apparently wasn’t enough.
You’d think they had learnt their lesson now, but no. Apple has decided that it wants to rummage around in your photo album. The culprit is called “Enhanced Visual Search”, and they rolled it out with iOS 18.1. It is supposed to help you identify landmarks in your pictures.
How thoughtful!
Except, I didn’t ask for it.
No one actually did, and no one got a chance to opt in.
Apple just assumed that you would be fine with it. Why wouldn’t you trust them with your photo metadata? It is encrypted, they promise. They’ll just run it through their servers, and vomit out a result. And all for the noble cause of reminding you that, yes, that’s the Eiffel Tower you took a picture of.
What they do not mention is the little detail where the data from your photos was already sent to Apple servers before you even knew that this feature existed. It is like that time I caught someone rummaging through my diary (yes, I keep a diary), who said after the deed was done, “Shit, don’t worry, I didn’t actually read it”.
Critics have already called out Apple’s hypocrisy. They put up billboards saying, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone”.
Apple is doing what every tech giant does best at the moment: sneaking into your life under the guise of bringing you “helpful features”.
You thought you got awaycause Google ain’t watching
So you dodged Siri, swooshed past Alexa, and you figured you would be safe with Google.
Cute.
Google has been having a field day with your photos as well.
Just visit this website called Theyseeyourphotos.com. It is created by a former Google engineer, and it shows exactly what their AI can learn from your cherished memories.
The guy behind the website, is called Vishnu Mohandas. He quit his job at Google when he found out that the company was helping the military make use of their AI to analyze drone footage. Yeah, that’s the same company who you are trusting your wedding album to.
It is a bit terrifying actually.
Now, how does it work. You upload a photo, and Google’s AI gives you a description that is so detailed that it could pick out the stitching pattern on your jeans. The site’s creator tested it with a selfie of his family, and Google identified the temple in the background and also his wife’s exact watch model.
A Casio F-91W, in case you were wondering, you geek (I love you!)
OMG! “The man seems to be middle-aged”, and he is probably from the Netherlands. And what you cannot read because of the cropping is the information it got on my actual whereabouts by analyzing the combination of the reflection in the glass pane behind me, as well as the reflection in my glasses.
The horror.
This is all baked into Google Photos. That is the app many of you guys us use to back up our lives.
Every party, every embarrassing costume, every nude.
It is all fuel for their AI.
Apple claims that this is to “help you manage your image library”. As if we need a neural network to sort my vacation pics. But Google keeps on insisting that it doesn’t sell your photos to third parties.
Aww, that is so nice of them.
Well the thing is, that they don’t need to.
They’ve already got all the metadata, the patterns, and the faces.
You can toggle off some of the features, but you can’t actually stop them from analyzing your pictures. Why, you askin? Because Google Photos isn’t encrypted end-to-end, and every single image you have given them is open to analysis.
So no, Google isn’t your safe harbor. It’s just another data-hungry beast.
Snitches all around
I think I can go on, and on, and on, like a member of parliament. Because if you think that Apple and Google are the lone wolves in this surveillance circus.
Uh, nope.
They have got plenty of friends.
Alexa started this whole shit show a long time ago. You recall she had been caught recording conversations without her precious safe-word? Or take security cameras, those lil sentinels of your home. Basically they are peep shows for hackers. And Ring cameras in particular seem to moonlight as a neighborhood gossip machines. Then there’s the robo-sux. Yes, the gadgets that have been developed to clean your floors. Mapping your home wasn’t enough for them. They have been caught snapping photos of your private spaces and, in one case, spitting slurs. Read:
Let that sink in. Even your vacuum has an attitude problem. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before your fridge starts live-tweeting your midnight snack choices. And if it’s up to Samsung, it will just be able to do that (CES 2025). So, if you’re looking for privacy, forget it. You are living with smart devices who are plainly snitches.
Your carrier is watching too
Think the spying stops with gadgets?
Aww,
Cute.
Your wireless carrier is in on it too.
AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and all of the rest are tracking everything. Where you go. What you browse. What apps you open. They call it “personalization”. They promise it’s for your benefit. Automated decisions. Fraud prevention. Research for the greater good.
Sounds noble. Like they are running a charity instead of a data-mining operation.
Of course, all of this is on by default. You didn’t ask for it, but you’re signed up. And if you happen to want out, you better wade through their labyrinth of settings.
T-Mobile even has something they call “profiling and automated decisions”. They swear they aren’t using it yet, but they might someday.
What for you ask? To predict your life better than you can?
With this “feature”, T-Mobile is collecting every scrap of data they can get their hands on, like your location, your habits, and even your movements. And their goal is to predict your next move before you’ve even made it. So T-Mobile knows when you’re likely to skip breakfast, and buy sandwich on the go, or maybe even ghost someone that you’ve been texting for a while.
AT&T and Verizon aren’t saints either. They are doing the same thing, just with slightly different labels. Though you can opt-out (if you know where to toggle off the switches), they have already sold enough data about you to fund their next big ad campaign.
And let’s not kid ourselves. When have tech companies ever resisted the temptation to use the data that they have collected?
Deleting yourself from the internet
So, what can you do about it? Maybe you are ready to scrub yourself clean and disappear off the grid. Well, good luck. Deleting yourself from the internet is as difficult as trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. It’s tedious. And there’s no guarantee it’ll work. But if you’re stubborn enough, here’s what you can do about it.
Start by learning how data about you is collected. That is OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and OPSEC (Operational Security). Know what they know. Understand the tools and methods that they are using to track you. Your social media footprints to the metadata on photos, everything is a thread in the web they have spun around you.
Then, go on a digital treasure hunt. Find every account that you’ve ever created. Old email addresses, social media profiles, abandoned forums. Delete them if you can. Lock them down if deletion isn’t an option. And scramble the rest. Feed the algorithms garbage data. Change your interests, post nonsense, and turn yourself into an untraceable ghost. It’s exhausting. But freedom isn’t free.
You can even use sites to do the job for you. Services like Incogni or DeleteMe specialize in scrubbing your personal information from data brokers and search engines. JustDelete.Me offers an extensive list of guides for removing accounts from various platforms. Then there’s Pimeyes, and I’m not sure if I would put them on the pile of the good guys or the bad guys yet, but I let you decide. Read: Look what I found on the dark web – a tool that your favorite stalker probably uses….
Privacy-focused tools like ProtonMail and Signal can help you start fresh with encrypted, secure communication. And if you’re really serious, tools like ExifTool strip metadata from your photos before you post them online.
Will this erase you completely?
No.
The internet never forgets, and neither does Big Tech.
But you can make yourself harder to find, harder to track, and harder to exploit. Because if you don’t fight back, they’ll just keep taking. And they’re not stopping until they own every digital breadcrumb you’ve ever dropped.
Then, start misleading the algorithm. Feed it garbage. Create anonymous accounts with fake names and fake interests. Keep your real life offline, and let the bots think that you are a 90-year-old knitting freak.
It won’t stop them spying on you, but it will make you harder to track. The sad truth is that you will never completely disappear. Not in this world anymore. But you can make it harder for them. You can make them work for every scrap of data. Oh, and don’t forget to teach your kids this. They have more to loose then we do.
Privacy is dead, my beautiful intelligent friends.
Big Tech killed it. And it sold it back to us as a convenience.
Later on this week, I’ll show you how you can remain a ghost on the internet**
Keep watching this space.
Signing off from the surveillance circus we call modern life.
Marco
** If you want to skip the cue, you can read the article here: TechTonic ShiftsPrivacy is dead, and here’s how to fight like hell to keep what’s left
Well, that’s a wrap for today. Tomorrow, I’ll have a fresh episode of TechTonic Shifts for you. If you enjoy my writing and want to support my work, feel free to buy me a coffee ♨️
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hAIku of the day:
Twenty dollars back,
For all your stolen moments,
Cheap price for your life.
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