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Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a long-running lawsuit accusing it of illegally intercepting customer conversations with its Siri virtual assistant and sharing snippets of those conversations with human reviewers.
The lawsuit was originally filed in 2019 after a whistleblower said The Guardian Third-party contractors hired by Apple to review Siri’s responses sometimes hear personal interactions, from patients talking to doctors to people having sex or taking drugs. Apple claimed that Siri only activates listening mode after detecting the wake word—“Hey Siri”—The Guardian reported that the assistant accidentally activated itself and started recording conversations in response to similar words and even the sound of zippers.
Fumiko Lopez, the lead plaintiff in the class action, alleged that Apple devices improperly marked her underage girls with brand names such as Olive Garden and Air Jordans, and then served her ads for those brands in Apple’s Safari browser. Other named plaintiffs alleged that their Siri-enabled devices went into listening mode without saying “Hey Siri” while they were having intimate conversations in their bedrooms or talking to their doctors.
In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs characterized the privacy intrusions as particularly egregious given that a key component of Apple’s marketing strategy in recent years has been to frame its devices as privacy-friendly. For example, an Apple billboard at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show allegedly read, “What happens on the iPhone, stays on the iPhone.”
The proposed solutionThe filing, filed Tuesday in a California federal district court, covers people who owned Siri-enabled devices and had their private communications recorded by unintended Siri activation between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024. Payment amounts will be determined based on how many Apple devices a class member owns that improperly activates a listening session.
Apple also agreed to confirm that it permanently deletes recordings collected by Siri before October 2019, and to publish a web page explaining how customers can join the Siri Upgrade feature, which allows the company to share and listen to voice recordings for quality. control.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shortly after The Guardian’s report, Apple temporarily has been suspended Siri’s answers are all about human appreciation and admitting that “we don’t quite live up to our lofty ideals.” The company said it would resume human evaluation after releasing software updates, and that in the future classrooms would be provided with computer-generated transcripts of conversations, not the audio itself, and would be conducted only by Apple employees, not third-party contractors. evaluation.