May 20, 20253 min readIs Your Tech Listening? Apple Settles Claim for Siri EavesdroppingApple is paying $95 million over claims that Siri secretly recorded private chats and fed targeted adsBy Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Dean Visser Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesSex, drug deals and doctor visits: according to allegations, Apple’s Siri eavesdropped on these and much more—on people’s iPhones, HomePods and Apple Watches—and used the content to target advertisements on users’ devices. Despite having denied selling our pillow talk to marketers, Apple just cut a $95-million check to settle a lawsuit in which plaintiffs reported eerie coincidences: discussing Air Jordan sneakers and immediately seeing ads for them; mentioning Olive Garden only to be served pasta commercials; talking privately with a doctor about a surgical procedure before seeing a promo for that very treatment. In early May the settlement administrator opened a claims website, allowing U.S. owners of every Siri-enabled gadget bought between September 2014 and December 2024 (essentially the lifespan of “Hey, Siri”) to request a payout of up to 20 bucks per affected device—enough for a drink and a wary glance at your phone.The lawsuit, Lopez v. Apple, dates back to July 2019, when the Guardian published the allegations of an anonymous whistleblower—an Apple subcontractor whose job was to listen to Siri recordings to determine if the voice-activated assistant was being correctly triggered. The whistleblower claimed that accidental Siri activations routinely captured sensitive audio. Despite Apple’s promises that Siri listens only when invited, background noises (often just the sound of a zipper, according to the whistleblower) could switch it on. The contractor said user location and contact information accompanied recordings.Apple had never explicitly told users that humans might review their Siri requests, and within a week of the Guardian report, the company halted the program. The first Lopez v. Apple complaint was filed in August 2019, and two weeks later Apple issued a public apology in which it promised to make human review opt-in-only and to stop retaining audio by default. That apology was framed to allay customer concerns—not as an admission of wrongdoing. Apple denied all allegations in the lawsuit, which is common in class-action settlements in U.S. courts.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.If the situation sounds familiar, your memory works. In 2018 Amazon’s Alexa recorded a married couple’s conversation about hardwood floors and sent it to one of the husband’s employees. Amazon blamed an unlikely chain of misheard cues—basically, it came down to Alexa butt-dialing someone with living room chatter. The following year Bloomberg reported that Amazon had thousands of workers transcribing clips to fine-tune the assistant. Later Google faced similar allegations. The pattern was clear: robots needed to be trained to make sure that they were hearing voice commands correctly, and this training needed to come from humans who, in the process, inevitably heard things they shouldn’t via consumer gadgets. Even TVs were implicated: in 2015 Samsung warned owners not to discuss secrets near its smart sets because voice commands were sent to unnamed third parties, a disclaimer that could have been written by George Orwell.This isn’t tin-foil-hat territory. A 2019 survey found that 55 percent of Americans believe their phones listen to them to collect data for targeted ads, and a 2023 poll pushed the number north of 60 percent. In the U.K., a 2021 poll found two thirds of adults had noticed an ad that they felt was tied to a recent real-life chat. But psychologists say this perception of “conversation-related ad creep” often relies on a feedback loop driven by confirmation bias: we ignore the thousands of ads that form a constant backdrop to our lives but build a campfire legend from the one time we mentioned “fire,” and an app tried to sell us tiki torches. The result is a low-grade cultural fear, with people placing masking tape on device mics and TikTokers begging Siri to stop stalking them. Knowing how ravenous tech companies are for data, people can hardly be blamed for this attitude.As for Apple, which once put “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone” on a Las Vegas billboard, the settlement doesn’t force it to admit fault—but lands a dent in its titanium halo: If the Cupertino, Calif.–based company can’t keep a lid on hot-mic moments, who can?(Asked for comment by Scientific American, Apple shared information on the settlement and emphasized its commitment to privacy. And Amazon reiterated its commitment to privacy, writing, “Access to internal services is highly controlled, and is only granted to a limited number of employees who require these services to train and improve the service.” Samsung and Google had not responded to requests for comment by the time of publication.)

A welcome surprise Space Force official: Commercial satellites can do a lot more than we thought "They could shave off about a third of the time and over half the cost." Stephen Clark – May 19, 2025 5:12 pm | 5 Astranis, founded in 2015, has designed a satellite bus with electric propulsion that can fly in geosynchronous orbit. Credit: Astranis Astranis, founded in 2015, has designed a satellite bus with electric propulsion that can fly in geosynchronous orbit. Credit: Astranis Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more A generation ago, when former NASA administrator Dan Goldin promoted the mantra of a "faster, better, cheaper" approach to the agency's science missions, critics often joked that NASA could only pick two. That's no longer the case. NASA is finding success in its partnerships with commercial space companies, especially SpaceX, with lower costs, quicker results, and improved performance. The Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government's spy satellite agency, are also capitalizing on new products and services from commercial industry. In many cases, these new capabilities come from venture-backed startups already developing and operating satellites for commercial use. The idea is to focus the Space Force and the NRO on missions that only they can do, according to Chris Scolese, director of the NRO. Military and intelligence agencies are already buying launch services, communications services, and satellite surveillance imagery on a commercial basis. These missions also have commercial applications, so the government is purchasing products and services with rockets and satellites that already exist. Now, the military is starting to use a commercial model for missions that, at least today, lack any meaningful commercial market. In these cases, the Space Force and the NRO must go out and pay a company to build an entire fleet of satellites that will exclusively serve the government. But rather than dictating stringent requirements and micromanaging every phase of the program, as the Space Force and NRO have typically done, they're going with a more hands-off approach. This change in procurement strategy is yielding results, officials said last week in a hearing convened by the House Armed Services Committee. Numerous companies are now manufacturing satellite buses, the basic chassis that hosts instruments, sensors, and payloads tailored for a range of missions. Most of them come from SpaceX, which mass-produces satellites for its Starlink broadband network. But there are others, and the market is richer than many US officials thought. "We're finding that commercial buses are not only available, but they're also capable of doing a lot of what our missions require, and they're available at a much lower cost than going off and developing a brand new bus," Scolese said. A case study in procurement The Space Force and the NRO kicked off several initiatives over the last few years to look at ways to exploit these commercial technologies. Some of these programs are already producing results. The Space Force's Space Development Agency has launched the first 27 prototypes for a future network of hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) to detect and monitor missile launches, and relay tracking data to the ground. The National Reconnaissance Office, which owns the government's spy satellites, awarded contracts in 2022 worth $4 billion to buy commercial imagery from three companies—newcomers BlackSky, Planet, and incumbent provider Maxar—with their privately owned spacecraft. The NRO also started launching its own fleet of commercially built spy satellites last year to more rapidly gather imagery of places around the world. Nearly 200 of these satellites, based on SpaceX's Starlink design, have launched in the last year. Most recently, the Space Force rejigged how it plans to buy a series of new space surveillance satellites for the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP. These satellites are designed to fly near and inspect other objects near geosynchronous orbit, a ring around the equator more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) above Earth. In that orbit, a spacecraft moves in synchronicity with Earth's rotation, giving satellites a constant view of the same region of the planet. This makes geosynchronous orbit a popular location for satellites designed for communications, early-warning, and eavesdropping missions. This image shows what the Space Force's fleet of missile-warning and missile-tracking satellites might look like in 2030, with a mix of platforms in geosynchronous orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and low-Earth orbit. Credit: Space Systems Command The Space Force has launched six GSSAP satellites built by Northrop Grumman, one of America's largest traditional defense contractors. Five of them are still operational, and the military wants to buy more. But this time, the Space Force will procure the satellites through a commercial arrangement. Instead of dictating stringent requirements to contractors and purchasing the satellites outright, the Space Force will levy fewer requirements and select a commercial company to develop the next generation of GSSAP satellites. Last year, the Pentagon canvassed the commercial satellite industry to see what might be available. Military officials soon hit a roadblock. The Space Force—and particularly US Space Command—closely guards details of the GSSAP program. The program's most exquisite capabilities are classified, and the Space Force defined requirements for the next-generation GSSAP satellites that would be subject to similar levels of secrecy. Leaders at Space Command, which actually uses the GSSAP satellites, agreed to relax their requirements, according to Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration.  The decision allowed the Space Force to move forward with a commercial procurement strategy that Purdy said will cut the cost of the system in half and reduce its development timeline by a third. "So, we're off working now with that program office to go start off a more commercial line," Purdy said. "And when I say commercial in this particular aspect, just to clarify, this is accomplishing the same GSSAP mission. Our operators will fly the GSSAP system using the same ground systems and data they do now, but these would be using faster, commercial build times... and cheaper, less expensive parts in order to bring that together in a faster sense." An artist's illustration of two of the Space Force's GSSAP surveillance satellites, built by Northrop Grumman. Credit: US Space Force The next-gen GSSAP spacecraft may not meet the same standards as the Space Force's existing inspector satellites, but the change comes with benefits beyond lower costs and faster timelines. It will be unclassified and will be open to multiple vendors to build and launch space surveillance satellites, injecting some level of competition into the program. It will also be eligible for sales to other countries. More for less with GPS There's another area where Purdy said the Space Force was surprised by what commercial satellite builders were offering. Last year, the Pentagon used a new "Quick Start" procurement model authorized by Congress to establish a program to bolster the GPS navigation network, which is run by the Space Force but relied upon by commercial users and private citizens around the world. The Space Force has more than 30 GPS satellites in medium-Earth orbit (MEO) at an altitude of roughly 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers). Purdy said the network is "vulnerable" because the constellation has a relatively small number of satellites, at least relative to the Space Force's newest programs. In MEO, the satellites are within range of direct ascent anti-satellite weapons. Many of the GPS satellites are aging, and the newer ones, built by Lockheed Martin, cost about $250 million apiece. With the Resilient GPS program, the Space Force aims to reduce the cost to $50 million to $80 million per satellite. The satellites will be smaller than the GPS satellites flying today and will transmit a core set of signals. "We're looking to add more resiliency and more numbers," Purdy said. "We actually didn't think that we were going to get much, to be honest with you, and it was a surprise to us, and a major learning [opportunity] for us, learning last year that satellite prices had—they were low in LEO already, but they were lowering in MEO," Purdy said. "So, that convinced us that we should proceed with it. The results have actually been more surprising and encouraging than we thought. "The [satellite] buses actually bring a higher power level than our current program of record does, which allows us to punch through jamming in a better sense. We can achieve better results, we think, over time, going after these commercial buses," Purdy said. "So that's caused me to think, for our mainline GPS system, we’re actually looking at that for alternative ways to get after that." Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy oversees the Space Force's acquisition programs at the Pentagon. Credit: Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images In September, the Space Force awarded four agreements to Astranis, Axient, L3Harris, and Sierra Space to produce design concepts for new Resilient GPS satellites. Astranis and Axient are relatively new to satellite manufacturing. Astranis is a pioneer in low-mass Internet satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and a non-traditional defense contractor. Axient, acquired by a company named Astrion last year, has focused on producing small CubeSats. The military will later select one or more of these companies to move forward with producing up to eight Resilient GPS satellites for launch as soon as 2028. Early planning is already underway for a follow-on set of Resilient GPS satellites with additional capabilities, according to the Space Force. The experience with the R-GPS program inspired the Space Force to look at other mission areas that might be well-served with a similar procurement approach. They settled on GSSAP as the next frontier. Scolese, director of the NRO, said his agency is examining how to use commercial satellite constellations for other purposes beyond Earth imaging. This might include a program to employ commercially procured satellites for signals intelligence (SIGINT) missions, he said. "It's not just the commercial imagery," Scolese said. "It's also commercial RF (Radio Frequency, or SIGINT) and newer phenomenologies as where we're working with that industry to go off and help advance those." Stephen Clark Space Reporter Stephen Clark Space Reporter Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet. 5 Comments