Apple to pay $95 million in Siri spying lawsuit

Tech giant Apple on Thursday agreed to pay $95 million to settle a proposed class action lawsuit that claimed its Siri voice assistant violated users' privacy.

A preliminary settlement was filed Tuesday night at a federal court in Oakland, California, which will be subject to approval by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White.

Mobile device owners who brought the complaint alleged that Apple had routinely recorded private conversations after they unintentionally activated Siri. The suit added that those conversations had then been disclosed to third parties, including advertisers who had served some users ads that had been tailored to conversations they had.

Voice assistants like Siri can be opened in response to certain verbal prompts that include "hot words" like "Hey, Siri."

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Two of the plaintiffs claimed that their mentions of Air Jordan sneakers and Olive Garden restaurants had prompted them to receive targeted ads for those products. 

Another plaintiff alleged that he had received ads for a brand-name surgical treatment after he had discussed it in what he had thought had been a private conversation with his doctor.

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Class members, who were estimated to number in the tens of millions, may receive up to $20 for each Siri-enabled device they own, such as iPhones and Apple Watches. The class period runs from Sept. 17, 2014, to Dec. 31, 2024, and began when Siri incorporated the "Hey, Siri" feature.

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Apple denied wrongdoing in agreeing to the settlement.

"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," an Apple spokesperson told FOX Business. "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 data to improve Siri, and we are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private."

The company also said that Siri data has never been used to compile marketing profiles nor has it been sold for that purpose.

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The $95 million settlement amounts to about nine hours' worth of profit for Apple, which had a net income of about $93.74 billion in its latest fiscal year.

Lawyers are seeking up to $28.5 million in fees, plus $1.1 million in expenses, as compensation from the settlement fund.

A similar lawsuit is pending on behalf of users of Google's Voice Assistant in a federal court in San Jose that is part of the same district as the Oakland court handling the Apple case. The plaintiffs in the Google case are represented by the same firms as in the Apple case.

Reuters contributed to this report.