Apple Agrees to Pay $95 Million to Users Who Claim Siri Spied on Them
Hey, Siri: How much does it cost Apple to settle a privacy lawsuit?
The tech company has agreed to pay $95 million in cash to settle a proposed class-action case alleging that products enable with the voice-activated Siri assistant violated people’s privacy, Reuters reported on Thursday night. The preliminary settlement was filed Tuesday evening in Oakland, California, and it awaits approval from U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White.
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The settlement comes after Apple-device owners claimed that the brand’s products regularly recorded their private conversations after they accidentally activated Siri, Reuters noted. These users allege that Apple then sent these discussions to third-party actors such as advertisers. For example, two plaintiffs say after talking about Air Jordans and Olive Garden, they were served ads for the sneakers and the restaurant. Another said after discussing a brand-name surgical treatment with his doctor, he got ads for the same treatment.
While Apple will pay up in response to the lawsuit, the company has denied any wrongdoing, Reuters wrote. “Siri has been engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement shared with Robb Report. “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.”
The period for the class-action suit begins on September 17, 2014, when Apple debuted the “Hey, Siri” feature that plaintiffs claim led to the surreptitious recordings. It runs through the end of 2024, and those who submit claims can receive up to $20 per Siri-enabled device. The lawyers for the plaintiffs, meanwhile, can ask for up to $28.5 million in fees and $1.1 million in expenses from the settlement. (The lawyers did not respond to Reuters’s request for comment.)
The $95 million settlement is but a drop in the bucket for Apple, though. It amounts to just nine hours of profit for the company, Reuters reported. In the most recent fiscal year, Apple tallied a net income of a whopping $93.7 billion.
This isn’t the only such tech-privacy lawsuit playing out at the moment. Google is engaged in a similar legal fight, with users of that company’s voice assistant also alleging invasions of privacy. That lawsuit is pending in the same district as the Apple case, and the plaintiffs there are being represented by the same law firms backing the Apple plaintiffs.
If this Apple case is to serve as a template, we could soon see Google agreeing to settle for a similar sum.
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