Apple agreed to pay $95 million on Dec. 31 to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company’s virtual assistant, Siri, activated without the wake phrase “Hey Siri” and recorded users’ conversations without their consent.
The five-year-old lawsuit, filed with the Oakland federal court, claimed that Siri could activate unintentionally to record conversations and then sell those conversations to advertisers.
“Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose … Siri has been engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning,” Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer wrote in a statement to The Guardian.
Mark Chamberlain, TV and film major, said he hadn’t heard of the lawsuit but wasn’t surprised.
“I never trusted those kinds of devices because you can’t trust big companies,” Chamberlain said. “I guess it’s good to hear they’re having to pay for it, at least. But to be honest, I don’t think it’s going to make any long-term changes.”
Apple stated that it “settled this case to avoid additional litigation so we can move forward from concerns about third-party grading that we already addressed in 2019”.
They are referring to the beginning of the lawsuit, which started from an article from the Guardian in Aug. 2019 that accused Apple of allowing contractors to listen to Siri recordings, leading the company to apologize.
Ilyes Tata, 19, physics major, had experienced issues with Siri.
“They got the lawsuit because Siri activated on its own. It literally happened to me two days ago, and it happened several times,” Tata said. “Whatever they’re collecting, they’re probably selling it off. The amount of money they made from selling it is probably way higher than $95 million.”
If the settlement is approved by District Judge Jeffrey White, Apple users in the U.S. could receive up to $20 per Siri-equipped device purchased between Sept. 17, 2014, Siri’s release date, and the end of last year with a maximum of $100 for five devices, according to the lawsuit.
“$20 is definitely not enough,” Tatva Vuppala, a Monta Vista High School student who takes classes at De Anza, said.
According to estimates in court documents, 3% to 5% of eligible consumers are expected to file the claims.
Apple isn’t the only large tech company facing privacy invasion lawsuits — in 2023, Amazon paid over $30 million to the Federal Trade Commission to settle lawsuits involving its Alexa voice assistant and Ring security cameras.
The Federal Trade Commission alleged Amazon allowed contract employees to access users’ video and audio recordings and stored sensitive data, including voice and location information.
“One thing my father and I would talk about is that technology grows at an incredibly fast rate,” Tata said. “The laws cannot keep up.”
