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Huh oh. As a committed anti-conspiracy-theorist for the "phones listen to your microphone and targeted ads based on what you say" thing I can tell this is going to be exhausting

From the Reuters story: www.reuters.com/legal/apple-... "Two plaintiffs said their mentions of Air Jordan sneakers and Olive Garden restaurants triggered ads for those products. Another said he got ads for a brand name surgical treatment after discussing it, he thought privately, with his doctor."

... but since the case is being settled, I don't think we get to hear if that ended up being proven or not It's actually a detail that originates with the original lawsuit filing back in 2021 www.reuters.com/technology/a...

I bet that detail ends being used as "proof" that this happens from now on out, and nobody will ever try to explain how Apple's Q&A recordings of snippets of wake words were somehow fed in realtime to the world's ad networks in a way that resulted in as targeting shortly afterwards

It would be interesting to see what happened if USA congress tried to pass a law banning ad targeting via surreptitious microphone recordings, mainly because I would love to see who came out to lobby AGAINST that

I'm fully aware that this is a total waste of my time, but I wrote a blog post about this anyway: simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/t...

Wow there are a lot of credulous people on Hacker News news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4258...

The alarming bit for me is that all we have to go on is word of mouth and there is “practically zero” regulation and transparency enforced on corps making assistants and such.

Apple just had to pay out $95 million because they sent audio snippets from "Hey Siri" wake words back to their server without disclosing that to their users

But was allowed to settle, no external review or anything setup to prevent future abuse, Siri still lights up for no good reason and why is this US only when Siri is everywhere?