After five years of legal back-and-forth, Apple has agreed to settle the Siri privacy suit brought by California device users that found the voice assistant unexpectedly listening in on their daily lives.
Apple will pay out $95 million to claimants, pending court approval. The case impacts iPhone users from the inception of the “Hey Siri” voice activation feature in 2014 to September 2024, though Apple was ordered to delete all voice recordings it had collected prior to October 2019. The case alleges that Siri could turn on unexpectedly and record the environment without users being aware it was active, in some cases potentially capturing confidential conversations or intimate moments. In some cases, those audio snippets were then sent off to third parties for review.
Siri privacy settlement does not involve Apple acknowledgment of wrongdoing
Siri has been available as a voice assistant app since 2011, but initially one that had to be manually initiated with a screen tap. Apple made Siri “always active” in 2014 with the “Hey Siri” voice activation feature, giving any powered-on phone the potential to activate and begin recording if users did not disable the feature in their settings menu.
Siri had a tolerance for “wake words” that extends to anything that might sound like “Siri,” however. This could cause the voice assistant to activate unexpectedly during the course of normal conversations. Which would not necessarily be a problem if audio processing was restricted to the phone, but the samples it took might randomly be shipped off to a third-party quality control contractor used to “rate” Siri’s capability and train the app to perform better. Users could not tell when this random selection, which Apple has only said is “less than 1% of daily conversations,” would happen.
A whistleblower from the contractor stepped forward to tell the media that some of the snippets they were receiving contained intimate moments, confidential business discussions, private medical information and even drug deals in progress. The contractor also noted that Siri could be triggered by certain sounds, such as zippers or car engines. The problem was also not isolated to iPhones; the whistleblower reported that the Apple Watch and HomePod smart speaker were among the chief Siri privacy offenders, having the highest rates of “false positive” activations and recording snippets that could last for up to 30 seconds at at time.
Claimants eligible for a payment from the Siri privacy case must have owned a “Siri device” between Sept. 17, 2014, and Dec. 31, 2024. These include iPhones, iPads, HomePod speakers, Mac computers, Apple Watches and Apple TVs. Up to five such devices can be claimed with a maximum payout of $20 USD per device. Since the recordings were anonymized and it is impossible for a user to tell if any given one was transferred to a third-party contractor, claimants will simply have to sign under oath that a device activated Siri accidentally during this time period.
Apple avoids potentially much more costly charges with Siri privacy settlement
The settlement amount is a drop in the bucket of Apple’s $391 billion estimated annual revenue, and it does save the company a potentially more costly judgment. If it had been found guilty of federal wiretapping and California state privacy laws, it might have had to pay out up to $1.5 billion in the end.
Some plaintiffs have claimed that, in addition to the errant quality control checks, the Siri privacy violations included using conversation snippets to serve targeted ads. Several plaintiffs claimed that ads started appearing for the Olive Garden restaurant chain, Air Jordan shoes and even a specific surgical procedure after they discussed these things in the presence of their phones. Apple has not made a public comment on this specific aspect of the case.
The Siri privacy case is not the only issue of this nature that voice assistants have faced. Most of the big names in the business have seen similar inquiries or legal action. Google has a similar suit pending in a California court over surreptitious recording by its own Voice Assistant tool, which could impact anyone who has owned a compatible device since May 18, 2016. The tech giant is also facing an antitrust suit alleging that it has used a monopoly position on the voice assistant market to set restrictive policies. Amazon has been publicly criticized over similar sending of random voice clips to third-party contractors for quality control purposes, and in 2019 added the ability to opt out of this practice. In 2021 a class action lawsuit was initiated by health care workers who claimed that Alexa had recorded private conversations even when a “wake word” had not been spoken, and that the company was hanging onto this stored data in perpetuity and regularly reviewed it for business purposes.
