Activating Siri on macOS necessitates sharing your contacts with Apple. This guide will show you how to use Siri without compromising your privacy.
When you enable Siri through the System Settings in macOS, you may receive a notification indicating that this action will share your contacts, geographical location, and voice recordings with Apple.
This policy by Apple undermines their stated commitment to user privacy and can understandably raise concerns about sending personal contacts to them.
However, if you’re keen on utilizing Siri with macOS Sequoia, this data transfer is a prerequisite.
Alternative Options
Fortunately, there are methods that allow you to enable Siri while keeping your contacts secure.
First and foremost, create backups of all your contact information so it can be restored easily later. By employing this strategy, you’ll remove the contacts from your Mac temporarily before activating Siri—this prevents any sharing of contact details.
Though slightly inconvenient, this method is effective. An alternative approach involves creating a separate startup disk on macOS that contains a fresh version of the operating system solely for when you need to activate Siri.
Having two bootable disks allows for switching between them via the System Settings Startup Disk option. While not ideal due to requiring multiple restarts of macOS, it remains functional.
If you’re utilizing iCloud for storing contacts, consider disabling iCloud syncing before making local backups; reactivate it afterward once you’ve restored your information.
Backing Up Your Contacts
Before enabling Siri on your machine again, ensure you’ve backed up all contact details thoroughly so they can be reinstated later. Two backup methods will be detailed below:
Method 1: Exporting Contacts as an Archive
This technique entails exporting all entries from the Contacts application into an archive file.
Open the Contacts app and select “All Contacts” from the sidebar menu without making any other selections then go to File -> Export -> Contacts Archive… in the menu bar.
Selecting ‘Save’ prompts you to name and choose where you’ll save this file—your entire collection is stored as an .abbu (Address Book Backup) file format.as previously called Address Book in older versions.
The filename includes a timestamp reflecting when each backup was created.
Ensure “All Contacts” is selected prior to exporting; failure could result in missing records due to existing bugs if not selected at export time.
Afterward exit out of the App confirming no background essential processes are running.
Method 2: Backing Up Via Finder’s AddressBook Folder
