Apple's personal assistant is handy for searches and questions but many users fear its use for privacy reasons, here's how to disable it
Siri, Apple's home personal assistant, is appreciated and used by most iPhone and iPad users. But not everyone likes having an artificial intelligence on their devices. Particularly for privacy reasons.
Siri can be disabled on both iPhone and iPad.
Siri can be disabled totally or only on the lock screen to increase the security of our Apple smartphone. First of all, for a practical reason: it may happen that the personal assistant activates itself or accidentally while the iPhone is in your pocket. This can lead to unintentional and unwanted actions that annoy the user, but above all it can allow an attacker who does not know our password and PIN to activate the phone and use some functions by exploiting the accesses of Siri on our device.
Disable Siri on the lock screen
In fact, there are two methods to disable Siri on the lock screen of our iPhone. In a case we just go to Settings then on the entry Siri and from the page that opens and select the heading Access lock screen and put the tick on off. In this way it will no longer be possible to activate Siri when the screen is locked, either by saying "Hey Siri" or by holding down the Home button. With the second method we'll just go to Settings and then to Touch ID and passcode. At this point we'll have to enter our ID and then we can change some functions on the lock screen, among them there will also be the item that "Disable Siri when the phone is locked".
How to completely disable Siri
If we no longer want for privacy issues to use Siri then we can decide to disable it forever. How to do it? There are two different methods, one works on iOS 10 and the other on iOS 11. If we have an iPhone running iOS 10 we simply go to Settings, then select the Siri item. On the page that pops up we click on the Disable Siri and that's it. Before proceeding we will see this message "The information used by Siri to respond to your requests will be removed from Apple's servers. If you wish to use Siri later, it will take some time to resend this information." If we are determined to disable Siri let's go ahead and confirm our decision. If, on the other hand, we have an iPhone running iOS 11 we need to go to Settings, then to Siri and disable both functions to invoke the personal assistant. Then the Home button pressed and the voice command "Hey Siri". Again, we will get a warning message first. The gist is the same as the text read on iOS 10, let's go ahead and confirm the deactivation.