Apple has acknowledged a bug in iOS 15 that may have caused users' interactions with Siri to be recorded on some devices, according to a report from ZDNet.
The bug automatically enabled Siri to improve dictation when typing, by giving Apple permission to record, store, and review your conversations with Siri.
Apple told The Verge that it identified the bug shortly after the release of iOS 15, stopped reviewing any inadvertently received recordings, and deleted information from affected devices.
After discovering the error, the company turned off the feature for “many users” and corrected the wrong setting by releasing the iOS 15.2 update.
Which is why a quick request for your permission to enable Siri's dictation optimization feature to record your conversations appears as soon as you install the new iOS 15 beta or official version.
"With iOS 15.2, we turned off the Siri Dictation optimization setting for many Siri users while we fixed a bug that was introduced in iOS 15," company spokeswoman Katherine Franklin said in a statement to The Verge.
"This unintended bug resulted in conversations being recorded for a small portion of the devices. Since the bug was identified, we've stopped reviewing the recordings and deleted the received recordings from all affected devices."
This appears to be a serious enough bug that Apple has found that users should be explicitly warned, urging them to make sure their iPhones are updated while notifying anyone affected.
The company's statement still lacks sufficient transparency about how many phones were affected and when.
Without this transparency, there's no way of knowing who might have recorded your conversations and listened to them by Apple employees, so if you have an iPhone, now might be a good time to update to iOS 15.2 or later (if you haven't already). already so).
For users who haven't upgraded to iOS 15.2 or later, Apple confirmed that it has stopped reviewing recordings and continues to delete any data received.
A statement from a company spokesperson said that Apple is deleting and no longer reviewing recordings from users who have not yet upgraded to iOS 15.2.