• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 2, 2025

Those who have been on a phone call when Siri on a nearby iPad interjects with search information not requested will likely relate to the ins and outs of this lawsuit.

Apple agreed to pay a $95 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming its voice-activated Siri assistant violated user privacy laws.

The preliminary settlement filed on Tuesday night in the Oakland, California federal court was reported by Reuters on Thursday. It still requires approval by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White.

Apple device owners often complain that they routinely record -- or at the very least monitor -- private conversations that activate Siri unintentionally.

Some have said these conversations are disclosed to advertisers and other third parties.

“Hey Siri” were the magic words that were supposed to trigger searches or other types of requests for information, but plaintiffs in the lawsuit said that data ended up in the hands of advertisers, who in turn targeted ads related to their conversations.

Class-action lawsuit members, which Reuters reported are in the tens of millions, would only receive up to $20 per Siri-enabled device, such as iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches.

The media outlet points out that $95 million is about nine hours of profit for Apple, whose net income came to about $93.74 billion in its latest fiscal year.

Since voice assistants have been around for years, the first one broadly available came from Apple in 2011. The assistant’s name is Siri.

Go back a few decades to 1952, when Bell Laboratories introduced Audrey, an early speech-recognition system that could recognize ten digits spoken by one voice, and then in 1962, IBM developed the first voice recognition software for computers, according to Google Gemini.

Now, companies like Google DeepMind, Microsoft and OpenAI have begun independently to launch and experiment with assistants that can have conversations with multiple inputs, people, and AI agents that follow through with verbal requests.

Siri, now integrated heavily with AI, can learn a user’s speaking style, understand the content of the query, use the device information, cross reference information and more. When someone opts into using Siri, they must agree for Apple to use their data. Apparently, that’s the tradeoff.