Apple agreed to pay 95 million dollars to end lawsuits filed by North American consumers who accused the giant technology company of recording conversations without their knowledge, using the Siri voice assistant, present mainly on iPhones.
“Apple has always denied and continues to deny any alleged irregularity and responsibility”, can be read in the agreement, set at 95 million dollars (around 92.5 million euros), which still needs to be approved by the courts.
The California-based technology giant, which built its brand image on the performance of its devices and respect for users’ privacy, accepted the settlement after a five-year legal battle, writes .
According to the class action lawsuit filed in 2019, Siri can be accidentally activated and record private conversations. The plaintiffs accused Apple of violating user privacy by transmitting these recordings to third parties.
The agreement requires the company to confirm that it has indeed deleted them and explain to users their choices in terms of storing the data collected by Siri if they choose to help Apple improve the voice assistant.
The value of the compensation, which will be distributed among a potentially large number of eligible consumers residing in the United States, should not weigh on Apple’s accounts, which has one of the largest capitalizations in the world.
In 2023, Amazon agreed to pay more than $30 million (€29.2 million) to the US Consumer Protection Agency (FTC) to settle lawsuits against its Ring doorbells and its Alexa voice assistant.
The FTC accused it of having given access to customer videos to hundreds of employees and service providers and of having stored personal data (about users’ voices, their geographic location) which, however, it promised to delete.
After years of little development, Siri and Alexa are gaining importance thanks to generative artificial intelligence (AI).
The new technology, popularized by ChatGPT in the last two years, makes it possible to gradually transform these still limited tools into AI assistants capable of holding conversations with humans and carrying out more complex tasks.
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