The iPhone 6 and Apple Watch were two devices owned by the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit:
Apple has agreed to pay $95m (£77m) to settle a court case alleging some of its devices were listening to people without their permission.
The tech giant was accused of eavesdropping on its customers through its virtual assistant Siri.
The claimants also allege voice recordings were shared with advertisers.
Apple, which has not admitted any wrongdoing, has been approached for comment.
In the preliminary settlement, the tech firm denies any wrongdoing, as well as claims that it "recorded, disclosed to third parties, or failed to delete, conversations recorded as the result of a Siri activation" without consent.
Apple's lawyers also say they will confirm they have "permanently deleted individual Siri audio recordings collected by Apple prior to October 2019".
But the claimants say the tech firm recorded people who activated the virtual assistant unintentionally - without using the phrase "Hey, Siri" to wake it.
And they say advertisers who received the recordings could then look for keywords in them to better target ads.
[...] According to the court documents, each claimant - who has to be based in the US -could be paid up to $20 per Siri-enabled device they owned between 2014 and 2019.
In this case, the lawyers could take 30% of the fee plus expenses - which comes to just under $30m.
By settling, Apple not only denies wrongdoing, but it also avoids the risk of facing a court case which could potentially mean a much larger pay out.
The California company earned $94.9bn in the three months up to 28 September 2024.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hey_popey on Monday January 06, @07:59AM (2 children)
What's not clear to me is why the plaintiffs settled?
From the court document https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.345934/gov.uscourts.cand.345934.336.0.pdf [courtlistener.com]
section II.C.2
So they spent considerable time on this and they accept to only get 10k$?
I'm not familiar with settlements in the US, would lawyers typically have advised the plaintiffs that they wouldn't have been able to win a lawsuit?
"Sorry buddy, I can't win a lawsuit but I'm happy to give you 10k$ out of my 30M$"!?
(Score: 4, Informative) by sneftel on Monday January 06, @10:02AM
It would be unusual for a major case like this to go all the way through to a final judgment. It’s not in anyone’s best interests: (further) litigation is expensive, and defendants don’t want to admit fault (and plaintiffs have no real motivation to force that on them). Both sides will have competent lawyers who will have come to basically the same conclusion about the likelihood and size of the judgment, and a settlement allows them to hedge their bets and reliably get the expected outcome more rather than rolling the dice later.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday January 06, @06:41PM
Because regardless of the stated math, first, settling is far cheaper than a losing lawsuit, and settling allows you to keep it private.
I and thousands of others were the victim of corporate fraud. Wells Fargo was writing mortgages to people like me who had just gone through a divorce and bankruptcy, then after two or three years of collecting high interest mortgage payments, stole the house from the one they had "issued the loan" to.
The Illinois Attorney General garnered $1,100 for me in the settlement. I should have gotten the entire amount of the interest I had paid, plus punitive damages, since Well's Fargo is a bunch of crooks who belong in prison for fraud.
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.