Justice given to victims of Siri eavesdropping

Siri is not just so bad in understanding you, but it's also bad in protecting your privacy, a class action lawsuit reveals. You probably have experienced this before, but the plaintiffs said that Siri was listening to their conversations and then using those conversations to personalize ads. For example, one plaintiff talked privately with his doctor about a particular surgical treatment and got ads for it, and another said that after talking about Air Jordan sneakers, they got ads for that same sneaker. The period lasted from New Year's Eve last year all the way back to the Hey Siri feature's first release more than ten years ago. Now the lawsuit has finally been settled, with Apple grudgingly agreeing to give up to $20 back per device, totaling up to $95 million dollars after counting the 'tens of millions' of plaintiffs who might claim money back.

Apple admitted to letting other companies hear parts of conversations back in 2019, the year when the case was made. As Reuters mentions, $95 million, although huge, is tiny for Apple, and is only nine hours of typical income (or slightly bigger than a 1/1000th of Apple's FY2024 profit). More money, however, might be requested ($29.6 million, in fact) for expenses and fees, though even with this addition it's still around a half-day of Apple's typical profit. The case can be found if you search up case name (in full): FUMIKO LOPEZ, et al., Plaintiffs, v. APPLE, INC., Defendant.

Update 1/6/25: After settling the case, Apple has denied selling Siri recordings to companies in a statement, saying that recordings have "never been used to build marketing profiles" and have "never been sold to anyone for any purpose", and points to improved privacy protections put in place in response to the lawsuit (so Apple no longer kept Siri recordings and people could opt in to have Siri improve by "learning from the audio samples of their requests") as the solution. It also says that "Apple settled this case to avoid additional litigation so we can move forward from concerns about third-party grading that we already addressed in 2019", and that data from the voice assistant is only used to "improve Siri".

By Leo