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A whistleblower claimed that contract workers would listen to confidential and private information recorded by Siri.
In a proposed settlement, Apple has agreed to pay $95m to US-based users whose communications were inadvertently recorded by the “unintended” activation of Siri – Apple’s voice assistant, spanning a period of 10 years between September 2014 and 31 December 2024.
Once court approval is gained, a single claimant can demand compensation from Apple for up to $100 for a maximum of five Siri-activated devices or $20 for one, including iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, MacBooks etc.
Following news of the proposed settlement, a spokesperson for Apple told SiliconRepublic.com that 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. 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 class action lawsuit against Apple was filed in California in 2019 following reporting from The Guardian which aired concerns from a company whistleblower. The whistleblower, who worked as an employee at the company, said that contract workers would listen to small portions of recordings made by Siri to grade the virtual assistant’s responses to queries and added that those recordings were often triggered by accident.
According to the whistleblower, contractors working for Apple overheard “confidential medical information, drug deals and recordings of couples having sex”.
However, at the time, Apple said that Siri’s responses were “analysed in secure facilities” and that all reviewers were under strict obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements.
Months later, it came to light that 300 contract workers from the Cork-based firm GlobeTech, who were employed by Apple as ‘graders’ to train and improve Siri, were let go.
Following the lawsuit, major players in the industry, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, came under scrutiny after admitting that recordings of user voice interactions with their software were in some cases stored and analysed by human reviewers.
In 2022, a similar lawsuit was filed against Google which alleges that its voice assistant recorded user communications even when a user did not intentionally trigger the assistant with the “Okay Google” command or manually activate it on their device.
Updated, 5.30pm, 6 January 2025: This article was updated to include a statement from Apple.
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