French prosecutors probe Apple's Siri following complaint (www.reuters.com)

French prosecutors have opened a formal probe into Apple’s Siri after a complaint, signaling renewed legal scrutiny of how voice assistants collect and process user audio. While details of the complaint weren’t included in the briefing, investigations of this type typically target whether recordings and related metadata were collected, stored or shared in ways that violate French and EU data-protection rules (notably GDPR), and whether users were adequately informed or allowed to opt out of human review programs. The case matters for the AI/ML community because voice assistants rely on large volumes of real-world speech data — often annotated by humans — to train and refine recognition and natural language models. Regulators probing consent, retention periods, anonymization, and third-party access can force product changes such as stricter opt-in mechanisms, on-device processing, stronger anonymization (e.g., differential privacy or federated learning), or limits on human transcription. A high-profile enforcement action would increase compliance costs and could set precedents affecting data collection practices across the industry, accelerating technical shifts toward privacy-preserving model training and greater transparency about dataset provenance.