Apple is facing another probe into the collection of voice recordings by Siri, after the Paris public prosecutor opened an investigation years after the events of 2019.

In 2019, Apple became the subject of criticism after it was discovered that recordings from Siri were sent to third-party contractors working for Apple for quality control purposes. Years later, after the dust had seemingly settled, France has decided to investigate the affair.

The Paris public prosecutor has opened a new investigation into the collection of recordings by Siri, and how they are dealt with by Apple. The investigation is being led by the OFAC cybercrime agency, reports Politico.

The source of the complaint the prosecutor is acting on was filed in February by French NGO Ligue des droits de l'Homme.

It is based on the testimony of Thomas Le Bonniec, the whistleblower who triggered the criticism and scrutiny into Apple's practices. Bonniec was a contractor for Globe Technical Services in Ireland, dealing with the recordings.

The claims at the time framed the recordings as being made to help Apple improve the quality of responses from Siri. Recordings that were not easily interpreted by Siri were anonymized and sent off for analysis by contractors.

The whistleblowing dealt with a combination of factors, including that the recordings revealed confidential and personal moments to contractors, such as doctors discussing medical histories or sexual encounters. All recorded because Siri was accidentally and unintentionally triggered in some way.

The criticism also involved claims that Apple did not explicitly disclose to consumers that recordings were being passed to contractors. However, Apple had been telling consumers that some queries were manually reviewed for years, and really the complaints were over a lack of clearer disclosure.

Resurfacing controversy

February's complaint to the French prosecutor was brought after Le Bonniec failed to appeal to data protection authorities to look into the matter, including France's CNIL and the Irish Data Protection Commission. The DPC closed the case in 2022 without conducting an investigation.

Le Bonniec believes there are "urgent questions to be answered" under the new probe. To Le Bonniec, this extends to determining how many recordings there have been since 2014, how many people are affected, and where Apple stores the data, among other queries.

Speaking to the report, an Apple representative insists that Apple "has never used Siri data to create marketing profiles, has never made it available for advertising, and has never sold it to anyone for any reason whatsoever." The claim follows the general company line and assurances it has given in the past.

More lawsuits

The new probe is not the only thing Apple has to face as part of the complaint. It also has to deal with a class action lawsuit in France, triggered in part by the complaint.

The lawsuit was also seemingly inspired by another class action case in the United States. That suit, which started in 2019, concluded in January 2025 with a settlement of $95 million, paying up to $20 per Siri-enabled device.

That settlement wasn't an admission of wrongdoing by Apple, as it quickly attempted to set the record straight with a Siri privacy statement in January. That statement insisted that the iPhone isn't "listening" to users, that Apple's privacy commitment wasn't a ploy to get user data, and that it definitely wasn't selling data.