Data Privacy: Apple agrees to pay nearly $100 million

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million (86.7 million Swiss francs) to end lawsuits from American consumers who accuse it of having unknowingly recorded their private conversations via its voice assistant Siri, present notably on iPhones.

“Apple has always denied and continues to deny any alleged wrongdoing and liability,” specifies the agreement signed Tuesday, which must still be approved by the courts.

The Californian technology giant, which has built its brand image on the performance of its devices and respect for user privacy, is emerging from five years of legal battle.

Improve voice assistant

According to the class action lawsuit filed in 2019, Siri could be accidentally activated and record private conversations. The plaintiffs accuse 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 to explain to users their choices in terms of storing data collected by Siri, if they choose to help Apple improve the voice assistant. The American group did not immediately respond to a request from AFP.

The sum, which will be distributed among a potentially large number of eligible consumers residing in the United States, should not weigh on the accounts of Apple, one of the largest capitalizations in the world.

Lawsuits against Amazon

In 2023, Amazon agreed to pay more than $30 million (27.3 million Swiss francs) to the US Consumer Protection Agency (FTC) to end lawsuits against its Ring doorbells and connected cameras and its Alexa voice assistant.

The FTC accused it of having given access to customer videos to hundreds of employees and contractors, and of having stored personal data (on users’ voices, their geographic location, etc.) that it had yet 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 over the past 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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