Apple agrees to $95 million settlement in Siri eavesdropping lawsuit

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a long-running class action lawsuit that accused the company of illegally intercepting customer conversations through its virtual assistant Siri and sharing excerpts of those conversations with human reviewers.

The lawsuit was originally filed in 2019 after a whistleblower told a whistleblower The Guardian Outside contractors hired by Apple to review Siri’s responses would sometimes overhear private interactions, from patients talking to doctors to people having sex or buying medications. While Apple claimed that Siri only activated its listening mode after detecting its wake word– “Hey Siri” – The Guardian reported that the assistant accidentally turned itself on and began recording conversations in response to similar words and even the sound of zippers.

The class action’s lead plaintiff, Fumiko Lopez, alleged that Apple devices improperly registered her daughter, who was a minor, with brand names like Olive Garden and Air Jordans and then served her ads for those brands on Apple’s Safari browser. Other plaintiffs claimed that their Siri-enabled devices entered listening mode without them saying “Hey Siri” while having intimate conversations in their bedrooms or talking with their doctors.

In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs described the privacy invasions as particularly egregious given that a core element of Apple’s marketing strategy in recent years has been to portray its devices as privacy-friendly. For example, an Apple billboard at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show wrote “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone,” according to the lawsuit.

the Proposed settlementfiled in a federal district court in California on Tuesday, covers people who owned Siri-enabled devices from Sept. 17, 2014, to Dec. 31, 2024 and whose private communications were recorded by accidental Siri activation. Payment amounts will be determined by the number of Apple devices owned by a class member that incorrectly activated a hearing.

Apple also agreed to confirm that it permanently deleted recordings Siri collected before October 2019 and published a webpage explaining how customers can opt in to the Siri Enhancement feature, which allows the company to share audio recordings and listen to them for quality. He controls.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shortly after the Guardian report, Apple temporarily hanging All human graded Siri’s responses and acknowledged that “we didn’t fully live up to our ideals.” The company said it will resume human grading after software updates are released, that from now on, graders will be given computer-generated transcripts of conversations, rather than the audio itself, and that only Apple employees, not outside contractors, will conduct the rating. Grades.