Apple settles Siri eavesdropping accusations for $95M

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging the tech giant used its voice assistant Siri to obtain and share private conversations without users’ permission.

The preliminary settlement, filed Tuesday in federal court in California, caps off the more than five-year legal battle over claims Apple’s Siri assistant regularly recorded private conversations and shared them with third parties, including advertisers.

The privacy and wiretapping suit alleged Siri recorded conversations even if users did not activate the feature, which is typically done by pressing the designated button or saying the cue phrase, “Hey, Siri,” to their iPhone or other Apple devices.

The settlement is still awaiting approval by U.S. District Judge Jeffry White, and lawyers proposed a Feb. 14 hearing to review the terms.

If the settlement is approved, tens of millions of individuals who owned iPhones or other Apple devices from Sept. 17, 2014, through the end of last year can file claims, according to court documents. Consumers can file for compensation for up to five Siri devices.

Each customer could receive up to $20 per Siri-equipped device, though only 3 percent to 5 percent of eligible consumers are expected to file claims, The Associated Press noted.

Apple did not acknowledge any wrongdoing in the settlement.

A spokesperson for Apple maintained 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,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill. “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.”

In 2019, Apple announced a series of changes to Siri in an effort to boost privacy. By default, Apple no longer keeps audio recordings of Siri interactions and gives users the option to opt-in to sharing their audio samples to help Siri train.

The company maintained only Apple employees are allowed to listen to these audio samples and consumers can opt out at any point. 

The $95 million is just a small part of the profits brought in by Apple, which reportedly had a net income of $93.74 billion in its latest fiscal year, and it is a far smaller number than the estimated $1.5 billion lawyers representing consumers estimated the tech giant could pay if the privacy case went to trial, according to the AP.

Updated on Jan. 6 at 8:30 a.m. EST