Apple will pay millions of dollars compensation for recording calls without users' knowledge
Although Apple has been creating a privacy defender for years, the American Federal Court in California accepted $ 95 million. Agreement on a collective lawsuit regarding the collection and listening of private conversations by Siri virtual assistant. The settlement covers all residents of the United States who, between September 17, 2014 and December 31, 2024, used any device serving the Apple voice assistant.
Each customer can report to five devices and – provided that the oath is taken that he has experienced unintentional activation of Siri during a private conversation – get up to $ 20. for equipment (maximum $ 100). Claims should be submitted by July 2, 2025, and the final approval of the settlement is to be made on August 1, 2025.
The source of the dispute was the practice of the so -called Grading, revealed to the world in July 2019 by signalists employed in an external company. In conversations with The Guardian daily, they described that They routinely listened to recordings containing medical data, intimate conversations or details of drug transactions – All this went to their headphones as a result of accidental, incorrect waking of Siri without the said phrase “Hey Siri”, which was to activate the service.
After a few days, Apple suspended the entire program and announced the audit of the trial, and at the end of August 2019 officially apologized to users, announcing that from the next iOS update the recordings will be sent to people-Reviewers only with the clear consent of the device owner.
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Siri listened when she shouldn't
Technically, Siri must constantly “listen” to the environment to capture the activating command “Hey Siri”. He does it on low power consumption systems, which in the loop buffer fractions of a second from the microphone. If the algorithm qualifies the sound felling as “Hey Siri”, it sends it – along with a few seconds of the context before and after calling – to Apple servers to recognize speech.
As long as the effectiveness of local recognition was limited, the company set the detection threshold to be very sensitive to avoid a situation in which Siri does not respond to the order. A side effect was thousands of false positives a day, which Apple needed to train voice models – these fragments went to “graders”.
This practice could last almost a decade and operated in the shade of a beautiful, but quite general slogan: “privacy. That's iPhone”. In January 2019, a huge billboard with this slogan stood in Las Vegas, right next to the CES fair, mocking the competition and suggesting that Apple devices do not “take out data” outside the company's ecosystem.
The reality turned out to be more complex. Apple encrypted and anonymized Siri packages, but Listening by man – even without assigned metadata – broke the social expectations of privacy And, as the plaintiffs claimed, the state regulations on recording without the consent of the interlocutor.
From the beginning of the dispute, Apple assured that the recordings did not sell to advertisers and that they only served to improve the quality of the service. Ultimately, the company went to settlement. Why? Because probably the punishment itself is not high enough to worry about it and better solve the matter as quickly as possible and quietly. $ 95 million penalties are about nine hours of company profitSo the settlement cannot be financially tasting. Nevertheless, the fact that Apple agrees to pay – still denying wine – is already a precedent, which the company wanted to avoid in an open process.
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Privacy narrative is a fairy tale
The Siri case is part of a wider picture of the growing tension between the Narrative Apple about “privacy as a human right” and real technological compromises. In March 2025, Apple was also sued for misleading the promotion of the Apple Intelligence package, i.e. an extensive, personalized version of Siri based on AI, which premiered was delayed for many months. Consumers say that they bought new phones from the iPhone series in anticipation of breakthrough functions, and instead got another promises.
Siri's settlement does not end the privacy debate in the Apple ecosystem, but reveals the paradox of the corporation that On the one hand, he invests billions in data security, and on the other – in the name of usefulness and progress of machine learning – exposes users at risk resulting from a human factor. The ten -year period to which the claim relates shows that even in a company famous for controlling details, a small algorithm parameter may imperceptibly turn into a system problem that requires court intervention.
Or $ 20 For the device, does it compensate for a potential violation of trust? For most owners of iPhones this is a symbolic amount, but for Apple it is a warning. The slogan “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone” will now be rated not after catchy slogans, but after compliance of practices with declarations and transparency of machine learning processes.
If the company wants to continue to sell privacy as a premium product, it must ensure that the subsequent editions of Siri – especially those promising deep, contextual intelligence – were created from the first line of the code in the spirit of the Privacy by Design approach, and not privacy by apology.
Author: Grzegorz Kubera, Business Insider Polska journalist
