Apple will pay $95 million to settle a proposed class action lawsuit involving Siri spying accusations, reports Reuters. The lawsuit alleges that Apple recorded conversations captured with accidental Siri activations, and then shared information from those conversations with third-party advertisers.
Two plaintiffs claimed that after speaking about products like Air Jordan shoes and Olive Garden, their devices showed ads for those products, while another said he received ads for a surgical treatment after discussing it privately with his doctor.
The lawsuit dates back to 2019, after a report outed the private conversations that contractors were privy to when Siri was accidentally activated. Apple was using contractors to evaluate Siri recordings to make improvements to the service, and employees claimed to have heard confidential medical information, drug deals, intimate moments, and other private data.
Apple was never secretive about the fact that some Siri recordings were analyzed by humans, but the company's privacy terms at the time did not explicitly state that there was human oversight of Siri. The customers that filed the lawsuit said that Apple did not inform consumers that they are "regularly being recorded without consent," and they claimed they would not have purchased Apple devices had they known about the Siri recordings.
While the lawsuit initially focused on Apple's lack of disclosure, the first filing was dismissed in February 2021 because it did not include enough concrete data about the recordings that Apple allegedly collected. An amended complaint that focused on Siri recordings used for "targeted advertising" was refiled in September 2021, and that was allowed to move forward.
There has been no evidence that Apple ever provided Siri recordings or information from Siri recordings to advertisers, and Apple's privacy policies have long made it clear that any data collected from Siri for the purpose of improving the feature is anonymized and not associated with a specific user.
In the settlement filing, Apple says that it "continues to deny any and all alleged wrongdoing and liability, specifically denies each of the Plaintiffs' contentions and claims, and continues to deny that the Plaintiffs' claims and allegations would be suitable for class action status." Apple is settling to avoid further costs of litigation.
The settlement has received preliminary approval from the court. According to the filing, all current or former owners or purchasers of a Siri device in the United States whose confidential or private communications were obtained by Apple between September 17, 2014 and December 31, 2024 are considered class members and could be eligible for a payment.
A settlement website will be set up to identify those eligible to participate within 45 days, with Apple required to share contact information for customers who purchased a device with Siri capabilities. Claim information will be collected until May 15, 2025, after which time the settlement will be finalized and payments will go out to eligible customers. Each class member will be able to submit claims for up to five Siri devices, receiving up to $20 for each one. The actual settlement payment will depend on the total number of valid claims that are submitted.
After the 2019 scandal about contractors listening to accidental Siri recordings, Apple temporarily suspended its Siri evaluation program, stopped using contractors, and implemented options that allow users to delete Siri recordings and block them from being listened to. In later updates, Apple moved some Siri processing on-device, reducing the content that's uploaded to its servers.
Update: In a statement provided to MacRumors, Apple made it clear that Siri data has never been used for marketing purposes or sold to any company for any reason.
Siri has been engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning. Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose. 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. We use Siri data to improve Siri, and we are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private.
Apple aims to do as much Siri processing on-device as it can, and in these situations, no data is uploaded anywhere. Reading a message aloud, for example, is done on-device with no content sent to Apple's servers. Data that is processed on Apple's servers, such as a request that requires location information, is assigned a random identifier and is not tied directly do an Apple Account.
Transcripts of Siri conversations can be used to improve Siri, Dictation, and Search, but any audio sharing is opt-in and has been since 2019, plus transcripts can be deleted at any time.
