14 DAY TRIAL // A class-action lawsuit filed in Northern California accuses Apple of violating users’ privacy and accessing confidential communications without consent as part of Siri data analysis.
Last week, it was revealed that a series of Apple contractors had access to private data like medical information and recordings of people having sex as part of an analysis of the data collected by digital assistant Siri.
The contractors, who were tasked with analyzing interactions with Siri for further tuning, could listen to “doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on,” as per a report from The Guardian.
Apple “recording users without consent”
The lawsuit claims Apple violated California’s Invasion of Privacy Act, the Unfair Competition Law, the Consumers Legal Remedies Act, and the Declaratory Judgment Act with “unlawful and intentional recording of individuals’ confidential communications without their consent.”
“Significantly, Apple knows that unauthorized recordings are common and as such tasks its human reviewers with, among other things, identifying whether Siri was deliberately activated or not. Despite this, Apple has not informed consumers they are regularly being recorded without consent,” the lawsuit states.
According to these claims, all iOS devices running iOS 5 and later and released after October 2011 with Siri built-in could send such information to the company because the digital assistant “is recording individuals without their consent.”
“At no point did Plaintiffs consent to these unlawful recordings. Apple does not disclose that Siri Devices record conversations that are not preceded by a wake phrase or gesture. Plaintiffs Lopez and A.L., therefore, did not agree to be recorded by their Siri Devices, respectively. Moreover, Apple could not have obtained consent from Plaintiff A.L., a minor without an Apple account,” the lawsuit also reads.
The class action calls for Apple to delete all Siri recordings from its servers and to pay damages in an unspecified amount to the plaintiffs.