Apple agrees to pay $95 million to settle long-running class action lawsuit. It accused the company of illegally intercepting customer conversations through its Siri virtual assistant and sharing snippets of those conversations with human reviewers.
The case was originally filed in 2019 after a whistleblower tipped off The Guardian At third-party contractors hired by Apple to monitor Siri responses, private responses are sometimes heard. This ranges from patients talking to doctors to people having sex or buying drugs. Meanwhile, Apple claims Siri only activates listening mode after detecting a wake word.—”Hey Siri”—The Guardian reports that the assistant accidentally launched itself and started recording conversations in response to similar words and even zip sounds.
Fumiko López, lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit accused Apple of improperly recording their daughter, who is a minor, of an Apple device. It mentioned brand names like Olive Garden and Air Jordans and then displayed ads for those brands on Apple's Safari browser. It is alleged that their Siri-enabled devices went into listening mode without them saying “Hey Siri” while they were having an intimate conversation in the bedroom or talking to a doctor.
in a lawsuit The plaintiff stated that the invasion of privacy was extremely serious. Because a key component of Apple's marketing strategy in recent years has been to frame its devices as privacy-friendly, for example, Apple's billboard at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show read “What if? with your iPhone, it stays on your iPhone,” according to the lawsuit.
at Proposed settlementIt was filed in California federal district court on Tuesday. It covers people who owned a device that used Siri from September 17, 2014 to December 31, 2024 and whose personal communications were recorded by accidentally activating Siri. The payout amount is determined by the number of Apple devices owned by the class member that improperly enabled the listening session.
Apple also agreed to confirm that it permanently deleted recordings collected by Siri before October 2019, and will publish a web page explaining how customers can opt in to the Siri enhancements feature that allows the company to share and listen to audio recordings for quality control. .
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shortly after The Guardian's report, Apple temporarily Suspended All human Siri ratings respond and acknowledge that “We have not fully lived up to our high ideals,” the company said, adding that it would resume human ratings after releasing the software update. And from now on Grade students will receive a computer-generated copy of the conversation. instead of sound And only Apple employees, not third-party contractors, will perform ratings.