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[00:00:00]

Apple has offered to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit in which the company was accused of eavesdropping on iPhones and other devices. The allegation is that for 10 years, Apple secretly activated the Siri on mobile devices to record people's conversations. As many of you know, Siri is the virtual assistant on Apple devices that should only be activated with the trigger words, Hey, Siri. The lawsuit claimed that some of these recorded conversations were then shared with advertisers in an attempt to sell products to consumers they thought would most likely be interested in those products. We can speak now to our North American technology correspondent, Lily Jamali. Good to see you, Lily. I thought Tim Cook, the CEO, had said that it was a fundamental human right to have your privacy protected by the tech companies. And yet now we learn, the allegation is, that they've been listening in for 10 years.

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It's a great point that you make When you think about the way that this company has branded itself, has marketed itself to consumers over these many years. When you think about the ecosystem in Silicon Valley, you have all these other companies that have made a business model, made billions upon billions of dollars by harvesting all of our data and monetizing it. You may have heard the phrase, We are the product, not the customer. And I think Apple has consistently differentiated itself on the basis of privacy. I think that is really one of the most interesting aspects of this settlement, settling a lawsuit that was first filed back in 2019. This has been a black eye to Apple, has really reshaped the narrative, the way that many people see the company, and I think they really want to put this case behind them.

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Is it just people in America who they were eavesdropping on, or allegedly eavesdropping on, or is it worldwide? How would we know if we've been affected?

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I am so sorry to ask you to repeat. I'm right by the airport and a big plane just went- Don't worry at all.

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Can you say that one more time for me? Yeah, of course. I was just wondering if it's just people in America or is it people worldwide that might have been affected? How would we know?

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Yeah, I mean, the way that we know is actually quite interesting. There's an anecdote that I can share from the lead plaintiff in this case who said that her daughter, who was a minor, had been having discussions, having conversations about some of her favorite brands. So Air Jordan came up, Olive Garden, which is a large restaurant chain here in the United States, and that in short order, her daughter started being served up ads for those very same brands in Safari, which is the browser that Apple owns and operates. So the pitch to consumers as part of this settlement is that in the US, to my understanding, it's really just American consumers that are affected by this, pending the approval of a US district judge, that consumers here will get up to $20 per device, with some caveats, $20 per device if they own one of the devices affected, whether it's an iPhone or an iPad and so forth. That's tens of millions of people who could be getting checks in the mail.

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Lily, thank you very much for that. Plenty more on that story on the BBC.