Is Siri always listening? Apple pays US$95 million in eavesdropping settlement
Apple has reached an agreement with a Californian federal court resolving a 5-year-old lawsuit based on allegations that Apple devices secretly activate Siri to record conversations through their devices. The lawsuit claimed that the recordings happened even when people didn’t purposefully activate the devices using the wake phrase “Hey, Siri.” Moreover, the iPhone manufacturer was accused of sharing recorded conversations with advertisers.
Once the settlement is approved by the US court, anyone who owned a device with Siri between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024, will be able to file a claim for compensation of US$20 per Siri-enabled device, with each consumer limited to a maximum. “Siri has been engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning,” Apple underscores in a statement. “Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose,” the statement explains.
Privacy, a fundamental human right?
In a 2019 statement, after the trial started, the US tech company affirmed the following, “at Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. We design our products to protect users’ personal data, and we are constantly working to strengthen those protections.” Apple said then that the company minimizes the amount of data it collects and that they never build marketing profiles of their users and never sell it to anyone.
From that point on, the company affirmed that they stopped retaining audio recordings of Siri’s interactions. Moreover, they said that users have to opt in to help Siri improve from the audio samples of their requests and that only Apple employees will be able to listen to audio samples of the Siri interactions. Before Apple’s 2019 Siri update, a whistleblower told The Guardian that Apple workers used to “hear drug deals, confidential medical details and people having sex.”



Big tech, big fines
US$95 million won’t make a dent on Apple’s finances, as the company reported US$65.17 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments in its latest financial report (from September 2024).
However, this is not the only judicial battle that Apple is facing. The Cupertino company, for example, appealed last year a US$1.8 billion fine by the European Commission (EC) for abuse of dominant position against music streaming rivals.
Apple’s competitor Alphabet is also facing legal trouble, as Google’s owner was forced to pay last year US$2.7 billion in a fine levied by the EU’s antitrust regulators, according to the EC.
Other big tech companies have also had to pay fines recently. In December, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) imposed a 4.75 million euro fine on Netflix that the company has appealed. One month earlier, the EC fined Meta US$840 million over abusive practices relating to Facebook Marketplace.