Apple has confirmed that "a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed onto contractors working for the company around the world," in an interview with The Guardian.

According to this article, Apple is sampling -- what they claim to be -- a small number of recordings from their assistant, Siri, to improve voice recognition, similar to what Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa do. Because Siri sometimes picks up that you're talking by mistake, Apple's contractors have had the ability to hear very private conversations, but Apple says that the recordings are not associated with a specific Apple ID to compensate from this extremely massive threat to privacy, particularly at the fact that Apple have been trying to earn the reputation to be the tech giant that cares about your private information

This contradicts what Apple's C.E.O., Tim Cook said in October, "We at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. But we also recognise that not everyone sees things as we do. In a way, the desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new. These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold. Taken to its extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself."