Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then sold to third parties for targeted ads.
In the proposed class-action settlement—which comes after five years of litigation—Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to "unintentional" Siri activations that occurred after the "Hey, Siri" feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, "Hey, Siri."
That is so far fetched. Why would Apple do that? Especially given both their brand and reputation as a privacy-first company combined with the large amounts of product design and engineering work they’ve put into preventing apps from doing exactly this kind of thing by enforcing permission-based capabilities and ensuring a “microphone active” icon is available at all times when an app is listening in.
Yet, because Apple settled this lawsuit, it looks like it is not interested in fighting these claims. It creates another piece of pseudo-evidence for people who believe microphone-equipped devices are transforming idle conversations into perfectly targeted ads.
Apple has added warning labels to AirTags and their boxes to comply with a law requiring the labels on products with button cell or coin batteries that could be ingested by children, according to a US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) press release.
“For Wicked, we had a lot of visual effects all around the world,” says Chu. “I could be at my house, and I could have a screen that was bigger than the one we had in the screening room, and I could be talking to all the people in all the different continents, and I would watch the playback.”
He would then zoom in and “draw” on the screen using his finger to point out potential edits. “Like, ‘hey, this ear looks weird on the goat’ … It just adds new dimension to how you see things,” Chu explains.
Maybe the dark-mode age was inevitable. The bright glow of computers was tolerable—even thrilling—when it still felt new, but as lit-up screens suffused our every waking act, their light was doomed to overwhelm us. Given that software developers are the people who develop software, and their software-making software had been in dark mode from the start, the latest trend should come as no surprise. Of course darkness would have spread from their desktops to everyone’s. From day into night, we are all programming computers now.
I don't like dark mode. I still like my windows to be like black-ink-on-white-paper.
I am not sure how much battery life I have 'wasted'.
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Thanks for reading.