Peanuts for Privacy Violations

The $95 million settlement isn’t much — it shakes out to roughly $20 per person, per device, and potentially less, depending on how many people file claims. The payout seems particularly insulting given the details of what was overheard. In 2019, the Guardian reported that Apple contractors “regularly” listened to private conversations and encounters including medical appointments, drug deals, and sex. The recordings were made accidentally when Sir “misheard” a word as its activation cue. It’s safe to assume that people weren’t deliberately activating it to share their most intimate moments with a global tech behemoth and its subcontractors.

We’ve come a long way from the days of caveat emptor — “buyer beware” — when issues of safety and consumer rights were left unaddressed. Social agitation and consumer rights movements, often in alliance with labor, fought for and won protections that persist to this day. But now, they’re being undermined bit by bit.

As the Verge reports, Google and Amazon have also been accused of sharing confidential conversations without consent, and Google is facing its own lawsuit. In sum, it’s become normal and tacitly accepted that multinational tech companies may record your private moments through their AI assistants and that those recordings could make their way to the ears of humans.

As for the cost of the violation, $95 million is a rounding error on a rounding error for a company like Apple, which managed to bring in roughly $391 billion billion in revenue last year, nearly $94 billion of which was profit. For tech giants like Apple or Google or Meta, privacy violations amount to little more than a piddling expense. Class action payouts are just a line item in the budget, not a deterrent to invasive practices. With just a few ultrawealthy companies dominating the market, users have few places to turn if they wish to protect their privacy — and corporations have limited incentive to respect boundaries.

A Bigger Problem — One That Includes Your Car

The tech industry, and everything it touches, has become notoriously bad on privacy. Intrusions — if not outright violations — have become routine.

In March, I wrote about the insidious practice of your car spying on you and sharing that information with insurance companies, to their benefit, of course. The Big Tech surveillance network has stretched to include every last inch of your life: your phone, your television, your speakers, your doorbell, your watch, your car, and just about anything else connected to the internet.

That we welcome these intrusions, ignoring them, minimizing them, or never thinking about them in the first place, invites companies and politicians to run roughshod over our privacy rights in the name of collecting data and making a profit. While this might sound like victim blaming, it’s less about assigning fault to individuals and more about highlighting the absence of collective resistance. Without grassroots pushback — whether at the political or consumer levels — privacy violations go unchecked. Yes, individual power is limited in a system that serves corporate oligarchs, but it’s not nonexistent. And yet many of us surrender what little power we have, deciding the trade-off to be worth the cost.

I’m as guilty as the next person. Building a self-imprisoning panopticon in the service of Silicon Valley’s benefit happens almost effortlessly. You add one device here, another there, and before long, you’ve built your own prison — one gadget at a time. After all, it’s the convenient thing to do and, well, everyone else is doing it — and where else are you going to go to get your toaster?

Apple’s class action settlement is a case in point. For such a serious breach of trust, the settlement amount — the trivial payouts to those whose privacy was violated — ought to bring the problem we face into focus. We have given away our right to privacy, and we are utterly unserious about fighting for it or punishing those who violate it.

Protecting Privacy Can’t Be Left to the Free Market or Consumers Alone

Apple’s payout ought to have been exponentially higher, and governments should be implementing strict guardrails to protect privacy, along with meaningful sanctions for companies that refuse to comply. Individual users may still try to opt for products or device settings that maximize privacy, but we should nonetheless face the reality that smart devices are here to stay — and indeed, many consumers prefer them.

Those consumers deserve the protection of governments that enforce strong privacy standards. It’s not an outrageous demand that companies be required to keep consumers’ data safe, handling it responsibly and only with direct, express consent — not through hidden terms of service or obscure settings designed to exploit users by way of legalese and technicalities. Indeed, insisting on robust consumer protections in the digital era would be consistent with, and a logical extension of, the rights won in the last century and increasingly squandered. We shouldn’t cede those rights to the tech behemoths of the panopticon age.

Fighting for privacy rights in the digital age will require individuals to push for more, but consumer choice alone can’t determine our collective fate. Governments worldwide must establish and enforce robust privacy standards, and that effort begins with public demand. An insulting $20 payout for a massive privacy breach seems as good a place as any to use as a launch pad.