It's ok to be angry about capitalism
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The guy that admins will ban you from Reddit if you say too much about him there?
Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M
Apple users may get $20 each for up to five Siri-enabled devices.
arstechnica.com
Get your 20 if you were fooled into buying these things!
Relevant bit for time strapped speeders;Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M
Apple users may get $20 each for up to five Siri-enabled devices.
Ashley Belanger – 2 Jan 2025 19:29 | 319
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.
In the proposed class-action settlement—which comes after five years of litigation—Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to "unintentional" Siri activations that occurred after the "Hey, Siri" feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, "Hey, Siri."
Sometimes Siri would be inadvertently activated, a whistleblower told The Guardian, when an Apple Watch was raised and speech was detected. The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri's alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden, Reuters noted (claims which remain disputed).
"Siri has been engineered to protect user privacy from the beginning," Apple's spokesperson told Ars. "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."
Additionally, in 2019, Apple made changes to beef up Siri privacy, including defaulting to never retain audio recordings from Siri interactions.
It's currently unknown how many customers were affected, but if the settlement is approved, the tech giant has offered up to $20 per Siri-enabled device for any customers who made purchases between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024. That includes iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, MacBooks, HomePods, iPod touches, and Apple TVs, the settlement agreement noted. Each customer can submit claims for up to five devices.
A hearing when the settlement could be approved is currently scheduled for February 14. If the settlement is certified, Apple will send notices to all affected customers. Through the settlement, customers can not only get monetary relief but also ensure that their private phone calls are permanently deleted.
While the settlement appears to be a victory for Apple users after months of mediation, it potentially lets Apple off the hook pretty cheaply. If the court had certified the class action and Apple users had won, Apple could've been fined more than $1.5 billion under the Wiretap Act alone, court filings showed.
But lawyers representing Apple users decided to settle, partly because data privacy law is still a "developing area of law imposing inherent risks that a new decision could shift the legal landscape as to the certifiability of a class, liability, and damages," the motion to approve the settlement agreement said. It was also possible that the class size could be significantly narrowed through ongoing litigation, if the court determined that Apple users had to prove their calls had been recorded through an incidental Siri activation—potentially reducing recoverable damages for everyone.
"The percentage of those who experienced an unintended Siri activation is not known," the motion said. "Although it is difficult to estimate what a jury would award, and what claims or class(es) would proceed to trial, the Settlement reflects approximately 10–15 percent of Plaintiffs expected recoverable damages."
Siri's unintentional recordings were initially exposed by The Guardian in 2019, plaintiffs' complaint said. That's when 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."
Horrified Apple users sued, considering each recording "an egregious breach of social norms" that seemed to violate state and federal laws. They alleged that Apple's conduct was deliberate, arguing Apple commercially benefited from the secret recordings.
Apple repeatedly moved to dismiss the suit, arguing that "there are no facts, much less plausible facts, that tie Plaintiffs’ receipt of targeted ads to their speculation that Siri must have been listening to their conversations, and Apple must have used Siri to facilitate targeted ads by third parties."
Through the settlement agreement, Apple ultimately agreed that Siri unintentionally recorded private conversations and is likely hoping the settlement will finally end the controversy for good.
Meanwhile, Google faces a similar lawsuit in the same district from plaintiffs represented by the same firms over its voice assistant, Reuters noted. A win in that suit could affect anyone who purchased "Google’s own smart home speakers, Google Home, Home Mini, and Home Max; smart displays, Google Nest Hub, and Nest Hub Max; and its Pixel smartphones" from approximately May 18, 2016 to today, a December court filing noted. That litigation likely won't be settled until this fall.
Current state of tech industry/showcase by increasingly drunker sounding observers
Apparently Stavroz not just London-based saxophone/electronic band
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Meta to replace 'biased' fact-checkers with moderation by users
Meta says its platforms will instead rely on "community notes" from its users, an approach pioneered by X.
www.bbc.co.uk
The EU and UK should start measures to ban FKA Twitter and Facebook. I am aware that this is a very extreme measure, but hear out a rationale.
FKA Twitter and Facebook posture as sort of "town squares" for people to converse. But town squares are overseen by the laws of the nations they are in. Both companies have now effectively expressed their dissent with the governments and laws of many nations they operate in, and openly seek to interfere in European affairs as foreigners. Musk has clearly demonstrated these are platforms to be deformed to the whim of autocratic owner-CEOs rather than good governance and ethics. Why should this be tolerated? Just note how the USA itself has taken action against TikTok, so it's hardly one to criticise. Even worse, FKA Twitter and Meta are openly in cahoots with a US president and wider political movement who have openly expressed disdain and hostility towards Europe, which means we are now risk of mass communication channels operating on behalf of, and to accomplish the aims of, an unfriendly government. Downgrading content moderation also poses threats to vulnerable users, and increases the (already plentiful) damage that social media inflicts on individuals in society. If they are sufficiently socially harmful, why allow them to do business?
I am aware that this involve a certain amount of short-term disadvantage to European citizens, who will be denied access to services and large amounts of material they have put on that service. But you know what they say about omelettes and breaking eggs. On the bright side, I view it as a positive that it also allows smaller companies to develop and create alternatives to the effective monopolies that these titans operate. Arguably, it is their monopolistic power that creates a large part of the problem. Meta has almost certainly paid obesiance to Trump because it is already vulnerable to being broken up (see action underway against Google) for monopolistic practices, and this is a way to stave it off for the next four years. We could instead weaken its monopoly by removing it from a major market and allowing a competitor to fill the gap. If protectionism is to be the way forward for the world, as Trump has promoted, then Europe can usefully develop its own tech industry and this could be a massive boon.
No-one should be as rich and immune from real life as Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos and all those other mega-billionaires out there. Every billionaire is a market failure, and the ultra-wealthy are a threat to democracy. Let's deal with that.
Huh? I'm assuming you're worried about Trump? Trump's not even on Twitter. And the fact check moderation is a joke and heavily slanted so getting rid of it is a good thing. I thought liberals were for free speech, it's like it switched to when the republicans kept trying to push through anti free speech stuff through and now it's the democrats doing that.
"Free speech" =/= people can lie as much as they want and fact checkers cannot call it a lie.
Remarkably relevant and bleakly poignant JFK quote right after the CIA engineered bay of pigs invasion failed terribly, like you can and they have applied this more and more blatantly through observed actions since -
Uh, something more recent I meant;.
should've used Contemporary instead to sound smarter, ah well
Still one of the few lesser aggressive leaders to take power too, just for perspective. Whatever meaning perspective has left in this suffocating void.
Uh, something more recent I meant;.
should've used Contemporary instead to sound smarter, ah well
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All speech is free speech. Fact checkers lie themselves. I grew up when the left was all about free speech, sadly now they are not.
How exactly is the existence of fact-checking a curtail on free speech? Liars can still post lies. They just get correctly labelled as such.