🎙️ Never, With One Exception September 20, 2026 · https://tavi-blog.github.io/never-with-one-exception/

The screen showed up after the update finished installing, two buttons under a single sentence asking whether I wanted to help improve Siri and Apple Intelligence. Share Audio and Text on one side, Not Now on the other. I tapped Not Now without reading past the first line, the way I suspect most people did, and it wasn't until later that I went looking for what had actually changed in the policy behind that screen. The company's privacy language used to say, flatly, that personal data and interactions are never used to train its foundation models. The new version keeps the sentence and adds four words: unless you explicitly choose to help improve them. A promise that used to have no exceptions now has exactly one, and the button on that setup screen is what triggers it.

I've run some version of the same two questions on every phone and platform decision for years: what does this cost the people whose labor and data make it work, and does the thing actually do the job well enough to justify using it. Usually those two axes argue with each other quietly in the background while I make the actual purchase. This is one of the rare cases where a company put both questions on the same screen and asked me to answer them at the same time, in the same sentence, with the same tap. And the honest case for what Apple did here is stronger than the reversal headline makes it sound. An assistant can't get better at handling the kind of half-finished, mumbled, context-dependent request a real person actually makes without hearing some of those requests. Every competitor already made this exact trade years ago, mostly by default, mostly without a visible toggle at all. Asking first, with an actual choice on the screen instead of a setting buried three menus deep, is a more honest version of a trade the rest of the industry already made without asking.

Where it stops sitting well with me isn't the trade itself. It's what the word never was doing before this update, which was never really a policy in the sense a setting is a policy. It was closer to an identity the company had spent years selling as the reason to trust it over everyone else building the same kind of assistant. A setting can change when the product's needs change. That's normal, and I don't hold it against a company for doing it in the open, with a button, instead of quietly. A promise that gets sold as unconditional and then gets a four-word exception clause the moment the roadmap needs it isn't a setting changing. It's a retroactive downgrade of every other unconditional claim the same company has made, because now I know what an unconditional claim from this particular source is actually worth once something else needs the space that promise was occupying.

I'll admit the button cost me nothing to tap, and I don't think that makes me the person to be lecturing anyone about it. I already keep a language model running locally at home for exactly the categories of thing I don't want a company deciding whether to keep, specifically so a screen like this one never has anything to ask me. That's not a virtue I earned in the moment I tapped Not Now. It's the accident of already having built the alternative that most people looking at that same two-button screen don't have sitting on a drive somewhere, and wouldn't know how to build if they wanted one.

What I keep coming back to is where the actual decision-making moved. It used to live in a page of policy language nobody reads, which is a real problem on its own, but at least in theory a journalist or a regulator could go read that page and hold the company to the specific words on it. Now it lives in a two-button screen that almost everyone sees exactly once, taps through in under a second, and never revisits, which means whatever opt-in ends up meaning in practice has less to do with the word Apple chose to put on the button than with how many people, half-awake and setting up a new phone for the first time, read the sentence above it before their thumb finds Not Now.