Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant, Siri, was eavesdropping on users without permission — even when disabled — and shared conversations with advertisers. Though Apple has denied selling the data collected from Siri, individuals who owned Siri-enabled devices between Sept. 17, 2014 and Dec. 31, 2024 are eligible to receive $20 per device.
Senior Sophia Dong, president of the Paly Girls in STEM club, said she wasn’t surprised by the lawsuit.
“There were definitely moments where sometimes Siri would suddenly activate, which I thought was a little creepy,” Dong said. “I don’t even remember what I was talking about, but it definitely wasn’t something that I wanted to share.”
With Siri listening to her conversations, Dong said she can recall moments where despite having Siri off, she received ads for things she had talked about in private.
“I remember there was one time where I really wanted to go to K-pop concerts,” Dong said. “I was thinking and talking about it, and literally the next day and the whole week after, I would just be bombarded with ads about an IVE concert in Oakland, and I was like, ‘How did they know what I was saying?’”
Computer Science teacher and CTE Instructional Lead Christopher Bell said he has seen countless data leaks and data breaches, and people should pay more attention to data privacy.
“If you’re letting others use your data or have your data at some point, it’s going to go somewhere that you didn’t intend, and people should always be aware of their devices and what permissions their devices have,” Bell said. “ … When people download apps, they often just blanket agree to allow access to everything in order for them to use the app, they have to.”
To ensure he doesn’t share information unnecessarily, Bell said he makes sure to look at the privacy settings of any app he downloads on his devices.
“The app still needs to function the way you want it to function,” Bell said. “But does everything need access to your contact lists? Does everything need access to your microphone? Does everything need access to your file storage? Being careful about that, I think, is the minimum we need to do in order to make sure that we’re not giving away too much data.”
But Dong said she thinks turning off the Siri function is designed to be complicated.
“It is a tactic that works because people are going to be less inclined to switch off the wake word activation,” Dong said. “I definitely think that the more barriers that you put to switching (settings) or the harder it is to deactivate Siri, the more people are gonna be lazy. Humans are lazy, and you want to just do what’s easiest, even if that means sacrificing privacy.”
Despite the potentially troubling use of user data, Apple may just want to gather as much information as possible and improve the user interface, Bell said.
“There is a line that it’s hard to tell whether you’re actually deceiving or not,” Bell said. “When you are hiding things behind multiple steps in order to turn on and off at the same time, you’ve got to balance that usability versus like the information, because every time you open up your phone, if you had to press 10 things to agree to, you would not really like that experience.”
For Dong, though, the issue extends beyond just privacy concerns since she said trust between consumers and companies is essential.
“It’s less about data breaching, but more about the underlying trust,” Dong said. “I feel like it’s a bigger issue than a lot of people realize, because consumer-company rapport is really important.”
One way to better educate young people about technology and privacy, Dong said, is for schools to teach students more about how to use technology safely.
“Especially given that our world is becoming increasingly reliant on technology, the more that students know about how to protect their data and keep themselves safe, the less danger that they can get into,” Dong said.
And Bell said PAUSD has such a plan.
“We have the digital citizenship curriculum that goes all the way through elementary and middle school, different courses at different times address different parts of that,” Bell said. “So students do get some information all the way into high school, and then it’s kind of individual teachers and courses that you’ll get information from.”
Bell also said PAUSD has a system for keeping students’ information and data safe, and he hopes that students can continue to protect their data when they leave school.
“Luckily, we have education laws that do protect us,” Bell said. “So we have protection now for students and for staff, but when they get out (of school) and those protections are no longer there, we still want them to be able to understand and do best practices.”
For students who are concerned about keeping their data private and want to look for ways to protect themselves, Bell said Common Sense Media, an American nonprofit organization that reviews and provides ratings for media and technology, is a good place to start.
“Common Sense Media rates different apps and products and gives more clarity for people to find out more information,” Bell said. “They are a great (organization) to go to since it’s also free.”
Senior Darwin Rescorla also said there are many other data protection options to choose from including open source projects.
“For example, if you want to somewhat leave Google’s monopoly, there are awesome free alternatives to Google Docs, like, for instance, the LibreOffice Suite,” Rescorla said. “The LibreOffice Suite is a great alternative. It has an equivalent to Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and it’s all free. It’s all open source. It’s all non-proprietary, nobody — no company — owns it … So generally speaking, open-source projects, especially those big as LibreOffice, are very, very safe. And so you can use stuff like that which isn’t owned by companies like Google.”
In the end Bell said protecting personal data is important, especially since the reliance on technology will only increase.
“I don’t see our reliance on technology ever going down,” Bell said. “It’s just going to keep going up. But what these things can do is shine a light on the importance of data protection and making sure that companies are held accountable to protecting user data to the best that they can.”