cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/30473984

The lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit, Fumiko Lopez, alleged that Apple devices improperly recorded their daughter, who was a minor, mentioning brand names like Olive Garden and Air Jordans and then served her advertisements for those brands on Apple’s Safari browser. Other named plaintiffs alleged that their Siri-enabled devices entered listening mode without them saying “Hey Siri” while they were having intimate conversations in their bedrooms or were talking with their doctors.

In their suit, the plaintiffs characterized the privacy invasions as particularly egregious given that a core component of Apple’s marketing strategy in recent years has been to frame its devices as privacy-friendly. For example, an Apple billboard at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show read “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone,” according to the lawsuit.

The proposed settlement, filed in California federal district court on Tuesday, covers people who owned Siri-enabled devices from September 17, 2014 to December 31, 2024 and whose private communications were recorded by an unintended Siri activation. Payout amounts will be determined by how many Apple devices a class member owned that improperly activated a listening session.

  • @[email protected]OP
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    65 days ago

    I’m not sure how Apple has/had the reputation as being secure, private or the “good guys.”

    • @[email protected]
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      115 days ago

      because theyre next to google, so virtually any company would look “better” when compared to them

      • @jaybone
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        55 days ago

        And Google used to be the good guys…

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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          25 days ago

          That’s two-fold. On one hand they were actually a better company back then, but on the other hand, they were perceived better because most people weren’t aware of how the company profits, or what they were doing.

          An example of their better attitudes in the past:

          “[W]e expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

          –Larry Page and Sergey Brin

          And they condemned as particularly “insidious” the sale of the top spot on search results

          https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/30/google-polluting-internet