1 week Ago By Chris Velazco
Apple has agreed to end a five-year legal battle over user privacy related to its virtual assistant Siri with a US$95 million ($169m) payout to affected customers, according to a preliminary settlement. The company, one of the most valuable in the world, signed off on the payment to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming its virtual assistant Siri can be accidentally activated, and subsequently record parts of people’s conversations without their consent. Apple then violated its users’ privacy, plaintiffs alleged, by sending those recordings to third parties.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said in the settlement agreement filed on Tuesday that it “continues to deny any and all alleged wrongdoing”. Siri, which originally debuted as a stand-alone virtual assistant app, became a hallmark feature of the iPhone when Apple embedded it into the iPhone 4S in 2011. In a bid to make the tool more capable and responsive, Apple launched a feature called “Hey Siri” in 2014, which allowed users to activate the assistant by speaking its wake words rather than pressing a button.
However, users eventually found that Siri could be overzealous in listening for its wake words. And when Siri mistakenly thought it was being invoked, it would begin recording audio clips of moments it was never meant to hear. Those clips, meanwhile, sometimes found their way to human contractors around the world who would review them - and get an earful of conversations and confidential dealings in the process.
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