Apple may owe you money because it let Siri spy on you
If you use Apple devices – especially Siri-enabled devices – you may be able to make some money. That’s because of it Apple just agreed to a $95 million settlement to resolve a class action lawsuit. The dispute? That Apple’s infamous intelligent assistant Siri violated users’ privacy.
Wait, what did Siri do?
Back in 2019we learned that Siri was accidentally spying on many of us. It has to do with how Apple trained and improved its assistant. As you probably know, to trigger Siri, you say “Hey Siri” (these days you can just say “Siri”) and the assistant wakes up and answers (or attempts to answer) your question or request. This is called a “wake word.” The problem is that sometimes the assistant gets something wrong and thinks it’s the wake word. It turns on, causing you to sometimes hear, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand,” when in fact you didn’t ask for Siri’s help at all.
To improve Siri, Apple occasionally sent snippets of audio recordings from Siri-enabled devices to third parties, in part to evaluate whether or not a Siri trigger was warranted in that particular case. Apple said it would send less than 1% of recordings to contractors and that none of the recordings were tied to the Apple IDs of the users from whom they came, but that wasn’t enough to protect their privacy. Because of this training policy, contractors were privy to “private conversations between doctors and patients, business transactions, apparent criminal dealings, sexual encounters, etc.” And while the user’s Apple ID may not have been attached to the recording, the contractors had access to the user’s location, contact information, and app data.
Apple created a situation where if your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, HomePod, iPod touch, or Apple TV thought you said “Hey Siri,” there was a slim chance that, what you were doing was shared with a third party partner somewhere in the world. However, Apple is not an isolated case here: both Google And Amazon Google has been accused of the same thing and is currently pursuing a similar lawsuit. Shortly after these reports, Apple made it happen Disable sharing Siri recordingsand later stopped saving the recordings altogether.
A share of $95 million may be waiting for you
The lawsuit that Apple just settled is between September 17, 2014 and December 31, 2024, the period during which “Hey Siri” was an option on Apple devices. If you can attest that your Apple device accidentally triggered Siri during a private conversation, you are eligible for a payout. That’s $20 per Siri-enabled device, with a limit of five devices. In theory, you could come out of this lawsuit with $100, but if too many class members come forward, the initial $20 could go down.
To be clear, Apple has denied wrongdoing in this case, even though the company apologized for the Siri debacle years ago. Additionally, this settlement requires the approval of U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. Until then, the payouts are not official.
As Reuters points out$95 million is about nine hours of profit for Apple. Justice.
