https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2019/08/08/535255.htm
Apple Faces Privacy Lawsuit Over Listening to Siri Users’ Recordings
By Mark Gurman and Robert Burnson | August 8, 2019
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Apple Inc. was sued over claims that the privacy of Siri users was violated when human reviewers listened to customer recordings.
The lawsuit was filed as a class action Wednesday, just days after Apple said it would pause its program in which company contractors would listen to a small portion of Siri inputs to improve the voice recognition service. Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. took similar steps after reports emerged about contractors hearing private information. Bloomberg News reported earlier this year that Apple had a team that listens to select Siri recordings.
The use of human reviewers by Apple, Google and Amazon already has spurred examinations by lawmakers and regulators in the U.S. and Europe. Privacy advocates have voiced concern that the companies’ practices could violate users’ rights, particularly in cases where devices begin recording unintentionally or without the user’s knowledge.
Appe has said that it listened to fewer than 1% of commands and that it only intends to listen to commands given to Siri intentionally. The company said when it re-enables the listening program, it will allow users to opt out from participating.
Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. The company also has said that the recordings are stripped of personally identifiable data, but reports have indicated that contractors could see some location information.
In Wednesday’s complaint, filed in federal court in San Jose by the adult guardian of a child in California who both use iPhones, Apple is accused of violating a California privacy law that prohibits recording of people without their permission.
The allegation is based on a story in the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. which said Apple contractors “regularly” listened to recordings without the knowledge of the people recorded. The unauthorized recordings included confidential medical information, drug deals and sexual encounters, according to a person described in the story as a company whistle-blower, but who wasn’t identified.
Apple’s user agreement gives the company the right to record users when they activate Siri with the “Hey Siri” command. But Siri “can be activated by nearly anything,” including the sound of a zipper or a user raising an arm, according to the complaint.
The plaintiffs also accuse Apple of lying to Congress in written answers to questions about its privacy policies. One question asked, “Do Apple’s iPhone devices have the capability to listen to consumers without a clear, unambiguous audio trigger?”
Apple answered: “iPhone doesn’t listen to consumers except to recognize the clear, unambiguous audio trigger ‘Hey Siri.”‘
The case is Lopez v. Apple Inc., 5:19-cv-04577, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).
Copyright 2020 Bloomberg.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/19/11465284/apple-siri-lawsuit-settle-25-million
Apple settles long-running Siri lawsuit for $24.9 million
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By Rich McCormick Apr 19, 2016, 10:47pm EDT
Source Albany Business Review
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Apple has elected to pay $24.9 million to Dallas-based company Dynamic Advances to settle a four-year-old lawsuit relating to Siri. The company raised the suit in 2012, arguing that Apple's Siri assistant violated a patent owned by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and licensed to Dynamic Advances. Apple's decision comes a month before the case was due to go to trial, and will see the tech giant pay $5 million at first to Dynamic Advances' parent company Marathon Patent Group once the case is dropped, before it follows up with the rest later.
The patent was the work of a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor, and described a "natural language interface using constrained intermediate dictionary of results" when it was issued in 2007 — four years before Apple introduced Siri in 2011. Around half of the money given to Dynamic Advances' parent is expected to go to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but the research university has yet to agree to a final figure with the company that gained the exclusive license to its patent.
As part of the settlement, Apple will be granted license continue to use Siri, and will be free of lawsuits based on the same patent for three years. The company has long been a target of patent holding companies — earlier this year, a US court ruled that Apple must pay $625.6 million to another firm for infringing on intellectual properties with a host of services, including FaceTime and iMessage. Apple has since filed for a mistrial.
https://www.computerworld.com/artic...49-million-to-settle-siri-patent-lawsuit.html
24.9 million to settle Siri patent lawsuit
Siri infringed a natural language patent granted in 2007, a patent holding company alleged
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By Grant Gross
Senior Editor, IDG News Service | Apr 20, 2016 9:26 am PDT
Apple has agreed to pay $24.9 million to a patent holding company to resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit accusing Siri of infringing one of its patents.
Apple will pay the money to Marathon Patent Group, the parent company of Texas firm Dynamic Advances, which held an exclusive license to a 2007 patent covering natural language user interfaces for enterprise databases. Marathon reported the settlement in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, in response to the settlement, Magistrate Judge David Peebles of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit against Apple filed by Dynamic Advances and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where the natural language technology was created.
[ Further reading: The wireless road warrior’s essential guide ]
A trial had been scheduled to begin early next month in Syracuse, New York. Dynamic Advances first filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple in October 2012.
A "portion" of the settlement will go to RPI, Marathon said in its SEC filing. The company believes "other voice recognition services also infringe patents involved in the settled action," it said in the filing.
The natural language technology covered in the patent was invented by Cheng Hsu, then a professor of decision sciences and engineering systems, and Veera Boonjing, then a doctoral student at RPI, according to an amended complaint filed in June 2013.
The patent covers "novel methods" for processing natural language, wrote lawyers for the plaintiffs. The technology gives computer and smartphone owners "the ability to input search queries or commands in language they would use in conversation with another person," they wrote in the complaint.
