Apple Agrees to Pay $95 Million to Settle Siri Eavesdropping Lawsuit

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Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a five-year legal battle that accused the iPhone maker of using Siri to eavesdrop on users without their consent and selling those recordings to advertisers, Reuters reports.

Apple has denied any wrongdoing here, as is the norm for such settlements. The $95 million is simply a payout to make the whole thing go away without a protracted and costly court battle. For affected class members, it’s expected to work out to a payment of around $20 per Siri-capable device. For the lawyers pursuing the class action, it could be up to $30 million. For Apple, it’s about nine hours of its profits, which were $93.74 billion last year.

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The proposed class action lawsuit stemmed from a 2019 whistleblower report that revealed Apple had been collecting recordings of “accidental activations” of Siri — those times when a HomePod or iPhone thinks it hears you say “Hey Siri” — and having them reviewed by third-party contractors. This aimed to improve Apple’s algorithms to reduce these false positives by analyzing what people actually said to wake Siri up and training Siri to be better at ignoring such things.

Although these recordings contained no personally identifiable user data at a digital level, many still included personal information based solely on what the people were recorded saying at the time. For example, while Apple wasn’t saving information like Apple IDs, IP addresses, or device identifiers, it couldn’t avoid the fact that some of these recordings would have involved people speaking personal information like names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card information, and so forth.

The whistleblower who leaked the report to The Guardian was one of the third-party contractors who reviewed these Siri recordings, revealing that some included detailed information like names and addresses, while others recorded very personal situations such as interactions between doctors and patients, business meetings, drug deals, and even couples having sex.

Homepod Siri

Apple changed its policies following that revelation, removing third-party contractors from the process and requiring users to opt in before Siri recordings — even accidental activations — would be shared with Apple in any way. However, those changes weren’t enough to stem a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of “unlawful and intentional recording of individuals confidential communications without their consent,” under California’s Invasion of Privacy Act, Consumer Legal Remedies Act, and Unfair Competition Law.

The lawsuit accused Apple of deliberately and willfully making these “unauthorized recordings” to be reviewed by human employees and contractors without effectively notifying consumers that they are “regularly being recorded without consent.”

The lawsuit explicitly covered only the accidental activations of Siri since it acknowledged that anyone deliberately uttering the phrase “Hey Siri” was effectively consenting to being recorded. No Apple device passively records conversations, but it’s not uncommon for a device like the HomePod to think it hears “Hey Siri.” In this case, most users either ignore it or tell Siri to go away, but they don’t realize that Apple may still record and analyze what they say after that.

While the initial lawsuit was tossed out for lack of evidence, the plaintiffs refiled and expanded their case, adding an allegation that Apple was not only having humans listen to and analyze these recordings but was actively selling them to third parties such as advertisers so the plaintiffs could be targeted with customized ads, as Reuters notes in today’s report:

Two plaintiffs said their mentions of Air Jordan sneakers and Olive Garden restaurants triggered ads for those products. Another said he got ads for a brand name surgical treatment after discussing it, he thought privately, with his doctor.

Reuters

There’s been enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that companies like Facebook and Instagram may be listening in, with users often reporting seeing ads for things that they’d recently spoken about. While skeptics point to confirmation bias, saying you’re more likely to notice a random ad for something after talking about it, many folks have encountered ads that are far too niche to be a mere coincidence.

While these apps can only do this if you have (or recently had) them open on your iPhone and granted them access to your microphone, that’s something many folks do with Facebook Messenger by default, as it can also be used to make voice and video calls. While the lawsuit doesn’t say what other apps the plaintiffs may have been using, it’s far likelier they came from one of those than Apple, which isn’t about to risk compromising its strong public stance on keeping your information as private as possible by selling Siri recordings to marketing companies when it isn’t even in that business.

In the settlement filing, Apple states that it “has at all times denied and continues to deny any and all alleged wrongdoing and liability, specifically denies each of Plaintiffs’ contentions and claims, and continues to deny that Plaintiffs’ claims and allegations would be suitable for class action status.” The filing is a preliminary settlement being proposed by Apple and still needs to be approved by US District Judge Jeffrey White.



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