Siri is changing from a simple voice assistant into a more conversational, context-aware system with iOS 27—and that upgrade brings a major privacy question with it. The new Siri can search through information inside Apple apps and supported third-party apps, giving it more context but also access to more of your device’s content.
Apple has begun rolling out the long delayed redesign, and the company partnered with Google to train the large language models powering Siri AI’s features. The result is a significant leap over the previous Siri, but the new abilities depend on a great deal of data from your phone. The good news is that Apple includes settings to restrict that access, disable AI features, and switch back to the old Siri.
Why the new Siri needs access to your apps
Siri AI can reach information inside apps through a framework called App Intents. When the feature is enabled, Siri searches Apple apps such as Notes and Messages to pull relevant information into its responses. If developers support App Intents, Siri can also scan supported third-party apps.
That access gives Siri the context needed to handle more than basic voice commands. Apple Intelligence can summarize messages and notifications, suggest actions across various apps, and connect information that might otherwise remain separated between different parts of your phone.
Apple says Siri AI combines on-device models with its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. When data reaches Apple’s PCC servers, Apple states that it does not store the data after processing and cannot see it. By default, Apple also will not collect or use data from interactions with Siri to train future versions.
Those protections do not mean every feature is active without controls. Users can restrict Siri AI’s access to content inside their apps through Settings, and disabling Show Content in Search prevents Siri from pulling information from specific apps.
There is one important limit to that restriction: Siri can still interpret screenshots and images through on-screen awareness, even after users restrict app access. That means controlling app search does not remove every way Siri AI can understand what appears on your display.
How to turn down Apple’s AI features
Users who do not want the new Siri can turn off Siri AI in Settings and switch to the old Siri. This gives people a direct way to reject the redesigned assistant without giving up Siri entirely.
Apple also provides controls for other Apple Intelligence features. Users can disable AI summaries for messages, email, notifications, and other suggestions through Settings. These options matter because summaries can surface information from several parts of the device, not just from a single conversation or app.
Writing Tools and image generation have their own restrictions. Apple places those controls in Screen Time under Content & Privacy Restrictions, so users may need to look beyond the main Siri settings to shut down every feature they do not want.
- Turn off Siri AI in Settings to return to the old Siri.
- Disable Show Content in Search for specific apps.
- Turn off summaries for messages, email, notifications, and other suggestions.
- Use Screen Time and Content & Privacy Restrictions for Writing Tools and image generation.
The number of settings can make this process feel scattered. A single switch does not control every Apple Intelligence capability, and several restrictions sit inside Screen Time rather than Siri settings.
Mac users face a storage tradeoff
The privacy and control conversation extends to macOS, where Apple Intelligence models remain stored on the computer even after users turn off related features. Apple Intelligence is listed as taking up 35.05GB of space on a MacBook Air, while the models themselves stay on disk at about 12GB.
An open-source tool called RemoveMacAI can handle the cleanup in one operation. It deletes the Apple Intelligence models, turns off Siri and Writing Tools, and disables Genmoji, Image Playground, the ChatGPT extension, and all summaries. It also blocks macOS from downloading the models again.
As Stevie Bonifield explained: “You have to find about a dozen settings, and several of them are under Screen Time. Even when everything is off, the models stay on disk, and that’s about 12 GB. I wrote RemoveMacAI to do all of it in one go. It turns off Siri, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, the ChatGPT extension and all the summaries, then it deletes the models and stops macOS from downloading them again.”
Apple plans to introduce new privacy safeguards for Mac users, especially around Full Disk Access for apps. That points toward the next phase of Apple’s AI push: not just smarter assistants, but clearer control over what those assistants can reach, what remains on a device, and what gets processed in the cloud.
The new Siri may be more useful because it understands more, but users now have to decide how much of their digital life they want it to see. The settings are already there—finding them is the first step.
Based on
- Siri can index more of your personal data — here’s how to limit it — engadget.com
- How To Disable Or Restrict Your iPhone’s Apple Intelligence Features — engadget.com
- An open-source tool lets you delete 12GB of Apple Intelligence data on macOS | The Verge — theverge.com
- Apple Is Planning Tougher Mac Privacy Controls for AI Agents – Business Insider — businessinsider.com
