If you’ve been keeping up with the recent discussion around how best to use Signal and how to keep journalists out of your private chats about national security matters, you’ll know that White House officials have been blaming an iPhone feature called Siri Suggestions for adding unauthorized members to a private group chat.

Siri Suggestions works on iPhones (and iPads and Macs) to give you contextually aware assistance when you need it. The feature might make suggestions about who to invite to events based on previous events, for example, or give you prompts for searches on your device, based on what you’ve searched for at certain times in the past.

In the case of the White House Signal chat blunders, it appears Siri made a contact suggestion based on details included in an email—only the contact details in the email weren’t those of the email sender but those of someone mentioned in the message, which is where the confusion arose.

As with many modern day AI tools, Siri Suggestions lets you choose where to draw the line on how much assistance to get. Whether you go all in or decide to turn it off entirely, it’s important to know what it can do and how it works.

How Siri Suggestions works

Siri Suggestions can pop up in a number of places on your Apple devices. You might see a suggestion from Siri on the lock screen about an app you want to open or a contact you want to get in touch with, based on what you’ve done in the past. Or, if you’ve attached a location to an event, you could see a notification in the calendar saying it’s time to leave .

You don’t really have to do anything to use Siri Suggestions except tap on the prompts as they appear. Sometimes, you won’t even see a prompt. If a call comes in from a number not saved in your contacts, for example, Siri will dig through your emails in an attempt to identify who’s calling.

Of course you need to be more careful with some of these suggestions than others. As ‘Signalgate’ demonstrated, you need to double-check when saving contact details to your phone, or confirming a calendar event that Siri has created for you. If the AI assistant has garbled the information , problems can arise.

Apple is keen to emphasize that everything Siri does here has strong privacy safeguards. Only a limited amount of anonymized information is sent back to Apple, and it can’t be linked to you. Also, all Siri Suggestions data is encrypted. It will be synced between your Apple devices by default, but you can turn this off: From iOS Settings, tap your name then iCloud, then disable the Siri sync.

Manage Siri Suggestion settings

To control the Siri Suggestions you see on screen, open Settings in iOS, then choose Apple Intelligence & Siri. Scroll down and you get a whole section on Siri Suggestions, so you can have them available in certain locations on your phone and not on others. There’s also a Reset Hidden Suggestions option here, which will restore any suggestions you’ve previously hidden.

Set the toggle switches as you prefer— to hide app suggestions from underneath the search bar, turn off Suggest Apps Before Searching, for example, and to stop any suggestions from interrupting you, turn off Allow Notifications. To hide suggestions from the share sheet pane, disable Show When Sharing.

Siri Suggestions also operates through individual apps, and you can manage how this happens by tapping Apps on the Apple Intelligence & Siri screen. The toggle switches available will vary depending on the app and how Siri interacts with it, and if an app isn’t listed, that means there are no Siri or AI settings to tweak for it.

Tap Mail, for example, to access Apple Mail settings: The first option is Learn from this App, which allows Siri to make suggestions from your emails. The next four toggle switches let you control how suggestions show up in Mail, including in the app itself, on the home screen, and in Apple Mail notifications.

 

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