Apple pushed out iOS 27.2 in October 2026, shortly after launching the iPhone Duo, its first passport-style foldable, and buried in the update is a privacy control that lets owners decide exactly which apps Siri AI can see into.
The new option sits in Settings under the Siri section and is called Excluded Apps. Add an app to the list and Siri AI stops pulling from it entirely, no more searching its contents for context, no more surfacing it in Search or suggestions, according to BGR.
That matters because of how far Siri AI's reach has grown. In its current form it can dig through the Messages app for a specific mention or a photo someone sent you, find a person or object you describe inside Photos, and comb your Safari browsing history and Reading List for anything relevant to a query. It also pulls from third-party apps, which is where the privacy question gets sharper. An assistant that can summarize what is inside your banking app or a messaging app you'd rather keep private is useful right up until it isn't.
How the toggle works
Turning an app off is straightforward. Open the Excluded Apps list, tap the apps you want left alone, then tap the checkmark in the top right to confirm. Reversing it is just as simple: go back into Excluded Apps, tap the red circle next to the app you want Siri to see again, and confirm with the checkmark.
The tradeoff is real, not cosmetic. Exclude Mail and Siri AI may no longer help draft a message there. Exclude WhatsApp and it won't take a voice command to fire off a text inside it. If an app is open on screen, Siri AI can normally answer questions about what's displayed, a capability that also disappears once the app is on the excluded list. Apple is framing it as a straight trade of convenience for control, and leaving the choice, app by app, to the person holding the phone.
More than a privacy patch
Excluded Apps isn't the only change in iOS 27.2. Siri AI now works in Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, on top of English, and it can hold onto context from earlier conversations, so a question about something raised last week doesn't require re-explaining the whole thread.
BGR notes the feature was already reachable through the Siri public beta, so some of this isn't entirely new to testers, but iOS 27.2 is the point where it lands in a shipping release. For anyone who held off on Siri AI specifically because of what it might read without asking, that reservation now has an actual switch attached to it.
Apple hasn't said whether Excluded Apps extends to iPadOS or macOS on the same timeline. For now it's an iPhone setting, tied to an iPhone update, arriving in the same software cycle as the company's first fold.
SDFiled by The Software Desk
Apps, platforms, operating system releases, security fixes and the features arriving in them.
More from this desk →
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.