by Admin
Jan 4, 2025
Apple has been found guilty of eavesdropping on their customers via Siri in a lawsuit against the company and has agreed to pay a settlement fee of 95 million dollars.
Fumiko Lopez, the lead complaint, said she and her daughter were recorded by Siri without their permission.
She highlighted that she and her daughter were targeted for several ads after she and her daughter talked about Air Jordan products.
In the preliminary settlement, the Tech company did not respond directly to any allegations about the bridge of privacy between the company and its customers, it said: “recorded, disclosed to third parties, or failed to delete, conversations recorded as the result of a Siri activation”.
However, the company’s attorney affirmed that “They permanently deleted individual Siri audio recordings collected by Apple before October 2019″.
The company’s claim contradicted the complaints filed against Siri, the claimants claimed that the tech firm recorded them who activated the virtual assistant unintentionally without using the phrase “Hey, Siri” to wake it.
The complainants say advertisers who received the recordings from Apple use their conversations as keywords on them to create a better target audience.
According to court documents, each claimant based in the US could receive up to $20 for every Siri-enabled device they owned between 2014 and 2019.
By settling, Apple not only denied any wrongdoing but also acted quickly to prevent the risk of a court case that could potentially lead to a much higher payout.
The Tech giant has been in constant payment lawsuits. In January 2024, it started paying out a $500m lawsuit that claimed it deliberately slowed down iPhones in the US.
Also, in March Apple agreed to a settlement lawsuit fee of $490m, a class action led by Norfolk County Council in the UK.