Siri can read your messages and notes: How to stop it
The app can access more of your personal data (photo: Getty Images)
Apple has launched a new AI-powered Siri—the voice assistant is now significantly smarter and provides personalized responses. However, these new capabilities require the algorithm to access more of the user's personal data, according to Engadget.
How new Siri gets access to data
Personalized responses are made possible by the App Intents framework. It allows Apple Intelligence tools, including Siri, to look inside apps on Apple devices.
By default, when responding to a request, the assistant searches standard apps such as Notes and Messages. If third-party developers add App Intents support, Siri can also scan their apps.
To process complex requests, the voice assistant uses both the iPhone's processing power and Apple's Private Cloud Compute cloud infrastructure.
Although Apple says it does not store or see information sent to its servers, users can control the level of access they grant the assistant.
How to limit Siri's access to specific apps
If you do not want the voice assistant to index the contents of certain apps, you can disable this access in iOS settings.
Step-by-step instructions
- Open Settings on your iPhone
- Scroll down and select Apps
- Select the desired app from the list
- Tap Search
- Turn off the Show Content in Search toggle.
After that, Siri can no longer retrieve information from the selected app. For example, if you disable indexing for Messages, the assistant will no longer be able to search or summarize your chats.
Control over screen recognition and voice recordings
Even after limiting search, Siri can still read information from the screen using its context recognition feature. It can analyze screenshots or images, which can help briefly summarize long articles or messages.
It is also worth checking whether your audio recordings are being sent to Apple for model training.
How to do this:
- Go to Settings
- Select Privacy & Security
- Scroll down and tap Analytics & Improvements
- Turn off Improve Siri & Dictation.
For those seeking maximum privacy, iOS still lets you return to the classic version of Siri through the Screen Time menu or disable the voice assistant in the relevant settings section.
