6mo ago

Apple to pay $95m to settle claims Siri listened to users’ private conversations

www.theguardian.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23866739

Apple @lemmy.world

fne8w2ah @lemmy.world

6mo ago

Apple to pay $95m to settle claims Siri listened to users’ private conversations

www.theguardian.com /technology/2025/jan/03/apple-siri-privacy-lawsuit-settlement

14 comments

Squarely a "cost of doing business" level of punishment. Worthless. But I'm sure everyone who receives a $0.37 check will feel like they've been made whole right?
Class members, estimated in the tens of millions, may receive up to $20 per Siri-enabled device, such as iPhones and Apple Watches.
The $95m is about nine hours of profit for Apple, whose net income was $93.74bn in its latest fiscal year.
That, of course, will cover the violation of privacy and all the private discussions sent to third party advertisers. Also the amount is negligible against their annual profits.
Remember, a settlement does not involve an admission of wrongdoing nor a judicial finding of liability. Therefore no action (most probably) will be done on Apple's side.
- I shudder to imagine all of the companies that license their consumer data databases, as well as the "insights" that consultant-types extract from them (and who their clients are),
- Why would anyone settle for that? I smell corruuuuuption! Where's Luigi when you need him
Keep this in mind as you listen to them claim that privacy is built right into ‘Apple Intelligence’. The profile that is being built as that system learns about you will probably grow to be the largest potential privacy threat that has ever been introduced to these devices and ecosystem. Keep that shit off your phone.
- Saw this coming 100 miles away. Any company that makes "privacy" part of their marketing campaign cannot be trusted, nor should be trusted.
  
  So how do you find actually private services?
So the plaintiff’s are claiming Siri was recording them without consent, and that Apple were sharing those recordings with third parties including advertisers.
Apple claims they were sometimes wrongly keeping recordings for internal quality control/analytics but hasn’t admitted to sharing them, and have agreed to the $95m settlement.
The sharing with third parties is the most egregious part here, but it doesn’t seem to be addressed any further.
Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, accused other tech companies of surveillance and said “[t]he desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new.”
I bet he'd argue paying protection money to a felon isn't anything new, too.
9 hours of profit, oh no!
Note that these were cases of it mishearing other noises as the trigger word. It’s still not recording until (it thinks) it’s heard the trigger.

14 comments