If you purchased or owned any Siri-enabled Apple products^[1] between September 17, 2014 and December 31, 2024, and will attest that you “experienced at least one unintended Siri activation […] during a conversation intended to be confidential or private,” you too may be eligible for $20 to $100 in compensation.

The lawyers who brought this class-action suit will get $30 million.

There were two underlying assertions from the plaintiffs: One, Apple contractors heard private, sometimes intimate conversations because of inadvertent Siri activations. Two, Apple sold Siri data to advertisers—the “I talked about shoes and then saw ad for it” phenomenon.

While the first may have been true (Siri does occasionally activate accidentally, and Apple did use contractors to review Siri recordings for quality purposes), Apple has long stated that they never sold Siri data to advertisers, and that they didn’t (and don’t) even have a mechanism for doing so.

When news of the settlement first broke in early January, Apple (as reported by MacRumors) said that it:

[…] continues to deny any and all alleged wrongdoing and liability, specifically denies each of the Plaintiffs’ contentions and claims, and continues to deny that the Plaintiffs’ claims and allegations would be suitable for class action status.

A few days later, Apple made it brutally clear they felt the lawsuit had no merit, publishing a statement headlined “Our longstanding privacy commitment with Siri” with this explicit and unequivocal sentence:

Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose.

Apple faced a potential $1.5 billion fine if they lost the suit (an unlikely but scarily-plausible scenario), so a $95 million settlement was a cheap way to end a legally fuzzy case (and avoid a potential PR nightmare). I’m sure it’s also less than the lawyers’ billable hours and three-martini lunches.

Likewise, I’m confident the class-action lawyers accepted the settlement because they recognized they were unlikely to win on the privacy and technology facts—Apple didn’t purposefully record customers without their knowledge, the recordings weren’t associated with any individual, and there was no way for those recordings to result in a related ad—so why not grab a massive $30 million payday for themselves (and a measly $20 to $100 for Siri customers, most of whom never experienced actual harm from the accidental activations)?

It may not be an actual “nuisance lawsuit,” but it edged up to that line.

The million-dollar question—make that the $20 to $100 question—is “should I submit a claim?”

If you’re otherwise eligible and comfortable asserting your Siri device was inappropriately activated during a confidential conversation, sure, go for it. If you don’t, your settlement cash gets distributed anyway via a cy pres award—usually to a nonprofit or advocacy group that is supposed to “align with the interests of the class.” Of course, you have no say in it—the lawyers and court get to spend your money as they see fit.

My suggestion? Take the money and then donate it to an organization of your choice. You get a tax deduction and the charity gets money they wouldn’t otherwise have. Win-win, right?