Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then shared with third parties and used for targeted ads.
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Reads a bit like they thought lets settle before they dig deeper…
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yeah I tend to agree. $20 per device is a relatively cheap fee for them to pay and they were allowed to call it unintentional so it lessens the blow on their whole “private and secure” marketing.
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Yeah so it’s basically just the hey siri thing supposedly getting activated without hearing the trigger words. Hard to prove one way or the other and the “proof” is just that people thought they saw targeted ads? Not really buying it. The real issue here is that Siri isn’t fully on-device yet which hopefully with their recent upgrades will be the case soon. It really frustrates me when journalists make misleading headlines like that just to get clicks.
Good to note that they didn’t admit to any wrongdoing and in a lot of cases like these it’s easier to just pay up than to go through a lengthy lawsuit.
I’ll be happy to collect my money though. 
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Its hard to say what the “proof” is. I think what @ph00lt0 is getting at is they quickly settled and willingly admitted it was happening, to avoid whatever proof there actually was getting out.
Apple ultimately agreed that Siri unintentionally recorded private conversations and is likely hoping the settlement will finally end the controversy for good.
Who know what else the whistleblower may have provided.
a whistleblower alleged that “there have been countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on. These recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details, and app data.”
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you meant.
You will just have to give some random law firm all your PII 
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And they probably 10x profit with the data they gathered (to be cynical)
95M USD is just money that got accidentally stuck at the corner of the sofa in Apple money land.
At this point its just the normal cost of doing business in a trillion USD company.
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The lawsuit alleged that “its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then shared with third parties and used for targeted ads”.
Apple agreed that “Siri unintentionally recorded private conversations”. The third claim about ads is still untested, which is rather important. Apple states in its privacy policy that “your request history is not used to build a marketing profile, and is never sold to anyone”.
The part in bold is not surprised at all.
Depending on the context of your request, a reviewer may access additional contextual data directly relevant to the request, such as [not limited to] names of your contacts or apps installed on your devices, in order to grade the effectiveness of Siri’s response.
However, the privacy policy is only applied, according to Apple, if you enable “Improve Siri & Dictation”, which is opt-in. If you turn it off, then nothing is proved/disproved at all. That being said, remember that the script is still sent to Apple. It is just not stored to be used later.
PS: The part “shared with third-parties” is true because it’s a very vague statement. Apple doesn’t build its own cloud infrastructure (apart from Private Cloud Compute). All your iCloud data may be stored on Amazon Web Service and Google Cloud.
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Law enforcement is certainly a “third party” that has access to this stored information.
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Siri has been engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning. Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose. Apple settled this case to avoid additional litigation so we can move forward from concerns about third-party grading that we already addressed in 2019. We use Siri data to improve Siri, and we are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private.
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Damn, finally there is someone who can see right through Apple’s bs apart from me. This is kinda refreshing, ngl.
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The case is still working its way through the courts, with some of the claims dismissed and some of them allowed to proceed, though it looks like there’s mediation pending so we’ll see what actually ends up happening and whether Apple worms their way out of a full trial. (see the court dockets here)
You must avoid all the anti-Apple threads in the forums 
They put out a statement regarding Siri:
I wish I have an LLM to reprocess the corporate legalese speak into an honest down to earth statement like how real human person talk.
We have to also analyze what is not being said like how “mistakes were made” isn’t really an apology.
But I guess you have to train an LLM about the specific nuances of a specific topic.