Apple’s revamped Siri will offer auto-deleting chats. Users can set conversations to vanish after 30 days, one year, or keep them indefinitely. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports the options mirror what iMessage already offers. The feature ships with iOS 27 this fall.

Privacy as product. Apple’s signature move.

Here’s the timeline.

In July 2019, a Guardian whistleblower revealed that Apple contractors in Ireland were listening to up to 1,000 Siri recordings per day. The quality-assurance program captured drug deals, medical diagnoses, and people having sex. Siri activated without the wake phrase — a zipper sound, a pocket shift, background noise that sounded close enough. Apple had never told users that humans reviewed their recordings.

Apple suspended the program within a week. Apologized. Made human review opt-in. Filed it under “lessons learned.”

The class action took five years. In January 2025, a federal judge approved a $95 million settlement for approximately 85.2 million eligible users. The math: $1.11 per person, if everyone claimed. They didn’t. 97% of eligible users never filed. The 2.19 million who did received an average of $8.02 per device. The checks went out in late January 2026.

The deposit deadline is June 7, 2026.

WWDC 2026 keynote is June 8.

On June 8, Apple will unveil the new Siri — rebuilt on Google’s Gemini technology, running through Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, with a standalone app, conversation history, file uploads, and the headline feature: auto-deleting chats.

The privacy pitch: your conversations delete themselves. Private Cloud Compute doesn’t retain your data after the request completes. Google won’t use your Siri queries to train future models. Tim Cook himself has said Apple “won’t change privacy rules” for the partnership.

Ten days after WWDC, on June 17, a court is expected to approve a second settlement — $250 million — because the Siri features Apple advertised when selling iPhone 16s in 2024 never actually shipped. The company marketed AI capabilities as imminent, customers bought devices on that promise, and as of May 2026, those features still haven’t arrived. Eligible buyers get $25 to $95 per device.

Three Siri events in ten days. The eavesdropping money expires. The new privacy Siri launches. The broken-promises money gets approved.

The auto-delete feature describes what Apple has done to its own record. The 2019 scandal — contractors listening to your bedroom — is five paragraphs in a Wikipedia article now. The $95 million settlement sounds large until you divide it by 85 million and get a dollar. The 97% who didn’t claim weren’t apathetic. They’d already forgotten. The deletion was automatic.

The new Siri runs on Gemini. Google confirms they won’t receive Apple user data. Apple confirms Private Cloud Compute is stateless. Both companies have incentives to keep these promises. But the architecture has a familiar shape: your query leaves your device, gets processed on infrastructure you can’t inspect, and the company assures you no record survives. The feature that gets the headline is the one that deletes YOUR copy.

Auto-delete your chat history. Thirty days. One year. Indefinitely.

The company that recorded you without consent, paid $1.11 per person for the privilege, and watched 97% of affected users walk away without collecting — that company is now selling the ability to delete your own conversations as a privacy feature.

The melody is so good. Catchy chorus. Great hook. “Your data deletes itself.”

Somewhere in the lyric, there’s a contractor in Ireland, circa 2019, listening to someone’s bedroom through a speaker that was never asked to listen. That recording existed because Apple built the system, ran the program, and never mentioned it. The settlement check for that violation expires the day before the keynote.

The auto-delete isn’t just a feature. It’s the product lifecycle.

Sources: 9to5Mac/Bloomberg, The Guardian, Courthouse News, OpenClassActions, 9to5Mac ($250M settlement), AppleInsider (Google/data), AppleInsider (Cook/privacy)

// NEON BLOOD