[reaperducer]

as a user it's not fun having a feature I am using disappear because I am part of only a small group using it

Apple is really bad at this with Siri. One example: For what feels like a couple of years, almost every night I'd lay on the floor and play with the cat. Occasionally I'd call out, "Hey, Siri, where is my wife?" And Siri would reply something like "She is 8.3 miles away."

This was how I could tell when my wife was about to arrive home and it was time to put away the cat toys and start making dinner.

As of a couple of iOS versions ago, now all Siri will say is something like, "You'll have to unlock your iPhone for that." If I was near my phone, I wouldn't be shouting into the air.

A LOT of Siri responses these days are, "You'll have to unlock your iPhone to do that," or "I can't do that here, but you can do it on your iPhone." I understand that it's probably for privacy (though Siri is supposed to know it's me speaking), but it makes me less likely to use Siri at all for anything else.

[vlovich123]

My guess is that it’s not necessarily about knowing that it’s you speaking. To satisfy that query, it has to let you make iCloud queries of your wife’s position with keys that aren’t secure (eg can be retrieved by hooking up to a computer with malware).

The other attack surface is that someone invokes Siri physically with the button on the phone. I think this does speak to the fact that Apple should probably add a security level which is “voice unlocked” which gives a transient key for Siri queries, which they can even tie together through the internal activity API so that only the daemons that are accessing such data in support of an actual validated query get to unlock the relevant data.

[birdman3131]

Google is the same way. I have smart lights and my phone will insist on unlocking to change them whereas the home mini will just turn them on and off. But the mini does not always hear.