By Ken Macon

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Millions of Siri users may receive compensation as Apple addresses claims of unintentional voice recordings and data misuse

Apple has agreed to a $95 million cash settlement to resolve a proposed class action lawsuit accusing the tech giant of breaching user privacy through its Siri voice assistant. The preliminary settlement, filed in a federal court in Oakland, California, awaits approval from US District Judge Jeffrey White.

The lawsuit alleged that Siri recorded private conversations inadvertently activated by users and disclosed these recordings to third parties, including advertisers.

Siri, like other voice assistants, responds to “hot words” such as “Hey, Siri,” which can unintentionally trigger recording. Plaintiffs claimed this led to targeted ads based on private discussions, citing examples such as ads for Air Jordan sneakers after casual mentions of the brands. One plaintiff also reported receiving ads for a surgical treatment brand after a private conversation with their doctor.

The lawsuit covers users of Siri-enabled devices, including iPhones and Apple Watches, from September 17, 2014, when the “Hey, Siri” feature was introduced, to December 31, 2024. Class members, estimated to number in the tens of millions, could receive up to $20 per eligible device.

Apple denied any wrongdoing in agreeing to the settlement and did not immediately comment on the matter.

Similarly, the plaintiffs’ attorneys have yet to issue statements. From the $95 million settlement fund, attorneys may seek up to $28.5 million in legal fees and an additional $1.1 million for expenses.

For Apple, the settlement represents a fraction of its financial might, equivalent to just nine hours of profit. The Cupertino-based company reported a net income of $93.74 billion in its most recent fiscal year.

This lawsuit isn’t the only privacy-related legal battle involving voice assistants. A separate case against Google’s Voice Assistant is ongoing in a federal court in San Jose, California, within the same judicial district. The same law firms represent the plaintiffs in both lawsuits.

From the Brownstone Institute

By Clayton J. Baker, MD  

“Pandemic preparedness” is a gigantic, deadly protection racket. I have described it in the past as arsonists running the fire department. That is precisely what happened with Covid, and that is what is being attempted with H5N1 Bird flu.

On December 31, 2024, the world received a year-end parting gift from the good folks at NIAID, Anthony Fauci’s old fiefdom at the National Institutes of Health. NIAID – the same unaccountable and secretive agency that Fauci used to fund the gain-of-function research of Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill and the Bat Lady in Wuhan that resulted in Covid – has a new director, one Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo.

Marrazzo and another NIAID colleague, Dr. Michael G. Ison, wrote a year-end editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine that accompanies a research paper on recent H5N1 Bird flu cases in the United States, as well as a case report of a lone case of severe illness associated with Bird flu in British Columbia.

Marrazzo and Ison summarize the findings of the research paper and case report as follows:

Investigators now report in the Journal a series of human cases from the United States and Canada. The former series involves 46 case patients with generally mild, self-limited infection with [Influenza type] A(H5N1): 20 with exposure to poultry, 25 with exposure to dairy cows, and 1 with undefined exposure.…Most case patients presented with conjunctivitis, almost half with fever, and a minority with mild respiratory symptoms, and all recovered. The only hospitalization occurred in the case patient with undefined exposure, although hospitalization was not for respiratory illness.

They elaborate on the single case of serious illness:

In Canada, a 13-year-old girl with mild asthma and obesity presented with conjunctivitis and fever and had progression to respiratory failure…After treatment that included oseltamivir, amantadine, and baloxavir, she recovered.

In other words:

• Over an eight-month period, from March to October 2024, 46 cases of human bird flu occurred in the United States, a country of 336 million people.
• There were zero deaths.
• 45 out of 46 infected persons had known exposure to animals.
• The majority of the cases consisted of conjunctivitis (commonly known as “pink eye”).
• Only one US patient was hospitalized, but this was not due to pneumonia – the principal life-threatening complication of influenza – and the patient recovered.
• One severe case was identified in Canada, a country of 40 million people, in an asthmatic, morbidly obese girl. She was treated successfully with respiratory support and existing antiviral medications, and she recovered.

Does this sound to you like a public health emergency worthy of the legacy media’s recent exhumation of discredited Covid-era fear-mongers like Dr. Leana Wen and Dr. Deborah “Scarf Lady” Birx? Does it justify their hair-on-fire pronouncements on cable news shows everywhere, pushing for indiscriminate PCR testing of animals and emergency authorization of more mRNA vaccines for humans?

Does this sound to you like justification to continue to kill and destroy (pro tip: “cull” means kill and destroy) millions upon millions of farm animals, when most animals who contract Bird flu survive, recover, and develop immunity?

Does this sound to you like justification for another Emergency Use Authorization of another mRNA vaccine?

No? Me neither.

But wait, there’s more.

In their editorial, NIAID experts Marrazzo and Ison fail to mention the following:

• There have been zero cases of human-to-human transmission of this virus.
• The current circulating clade of the virus has been determined by independent researchers to very likely have originated at a US Government gain-of-function laboratory, namely the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, GA.
• Multiple bioweapons laboratories, including the Yoshihiro Kawaoka lab at the University of Wisconsin, and the Ron Fouchier lab in the Netherlands (both of which have been affiliated with NIAID and with work done at SEPRL) have been doing gain-of-function research on Bird flu for many years, including experiments so outrageously dangerous that their work prompted President Obama’s ultimately unsuccessful ban of gain-of-function research in 2014.
• In 2019, NIAID reapproved and resumed funding Kawaoka and Fouchier’s dangerous work at increasing human transmissibility of Bird flu – the very same gain-of-function research that had prompted Obama’s ban.
• According to its package insert, Audenz, the current Bird flu vaccine, was associated with death in 1 out of every 200 recipients, compared to 1 in 1,000 placebo recipients.
• According to openthebooks.com, and as reported in the New York Post, NIH scientists received royalties totaling $325 million from pharmaceutical companies and foreign entities over more than a decade.

So, what are our friends at NIAID’s recommendations?

For one, they stress the “urgent need for vigilant surveillance of emerging mutations and assessment of the threat of human-to-human transmission.”

Are they advocating for the willy-nilly testing of entire livestock herds, as promoted by Birx, which is sure to create a preponderance of false positives?

Are they calling for the continued mass killing and destruction of millions upon millions of farm animals, whenever a fraction of the animals test positive for the virus?

Instead of PCR-swabbing every cow, chicken, and farm worker on Earth, how about we stop creating new mutant variants of H5N1 in the labs, since that’s where the current problem originated? How about we stop funding such utter madness with our tax dollars, funneled through corrupt government agencies like NIAID?

After all, you don’t save Tokyo by creating Godzilla.

But Marrazzo and Ison make no mention of this common-sense, sane approach.
Instead, they also stress the need for more – you guessed it – vaccines. They write:

we must continue to pursue development and testing of medical countermeasures…Studies have shown the safety and immunogenicity of A(H5N1) vaccines…studies are ongoing to develop messenger RNA–based A(H5N1) vaccines and other novel vaccines that can provide protection against a broad range of influenza viruses, including A(H5N1).”

Aside from attesting to the “safety” of a product where 1 in 200 users die, the use of the word “countermeasures” is extremely telling. It is a military term, not a medical one. We have already seen this game played with Covid. The gain-of-function lab research is done to produce a lab-manipulated, weaponized version of a virus, a version that is transmissible among and toxic to humans – in other words, a bioweapon. The vaccine is the countermeasure to the bioweapon. The vaccine is the intellectual property of those who created the bioweapon, and it is worth a fortune once the weapon has been unleashed. It is as simple as that.

“Pandemic preparedness” is a gigantic, deadly protection racket. I have described it in the past as arsonists running the fire department. That is precisely what happened with Covid, and that is what is being attempted with H5N1 Bird flu.

Moving forward to a new administration that has expressed a commitment to rooting out corruption in the pharmaceutical/medical/public health realm, improving the health of citizens, and restoring trustworthiness in medicine, I recommend the following steps to combat the H5N1 Bird flu, and to end the “pandemic preparedness” racket that threatens to hold the world hostage again and again, as it did during Covid.

• Immediately end and outlaw all gain-of-function and other bioweapons research in and funded by the United States, and apply all possible diplomatic pressure to eradicate it from the Earth.
• Eliminate all special protections from liability for vaccines, including the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and the PREP Act.
• Refocus Infectious Disease research on new therapeutics, rather than power-seeking and profit-driven vaccine development.
• Completely reform the National Institutes of Health, and close the incorrigibly corrupt NIAID altogether.

The fear pornographers must be discredited. We must make realistic and sensible decisions about our food supply.

We must learn the lessons of Covid, and live in knowledge rather than in fear.

We must end the protection rackets, confidence games, and shakedowns that government insiders impose on us like mafiosi.

Happy New Year!

Author

Clayton J. Baker, MD

C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.