Apple sought to allay privacy concerns about its Siri voice assistant days after it agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit related to the feature, saying it has never sold data collected by Siri or used it for advertising purposes. The company said in a statement on Wednesday that it had “never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose.” Apple said Siri uses on-device processing whenever possible—with information not transmitted to Apple servers in such cases—and that its searches and requests that do require input from servers aren’t associated with a user’s account...

Five of Wall Street's most-prominent billionaire asset managers have picked out some of their favorite stocks for the new year...

The S&P 500 is coming off back-to-back annual gains of more than 25% in 2023 and 2024 (including dividends), something it has only done one other time in its history dating back to 1957. The S&P 500 is weighted by market capitalization, so the largest companies in the index have a greater influence over its performance than the smallest. A lot of its recent strength is coming from its biggest constituents -- especially those in the technology sector, which operate at the forefront of trends like artificial intelligence (AI)...

Warren Buffett is known for his investing success, generating market-beating returns over the long run. As chairman, he's helped Berkshire Hathaway deliver a compounded annual gain of more than 19% over 58 years -- that's as the S&P 500 posted a compounded increase of about 10% during that period. Buffett believes in buying quality stocks for a reasonable price and holding on for the long term, and this strategy has shown itself to be a winning one...

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) are two of the biggest rivals in tech. Apple is ahead today, but which stock ends up more valuable in the next five or 10 years could ultimately depend on which business has the better AI strategy. In 2024, Apple's stock rose by 30% as it outperformed Microsoft, which increased by just 12% in value...