J.P.

• Per the BBC, Apple has agreed to pay $95M in a settlement claiming the tech giant was recording users without their consent.

The tech giant was accused of eavesdropping on its customers through its virtual assistant Siri.

The claimants also allege voice recordings were shared with advertisers.

Apple, which has not admitted any wrongdoing, has been approached for comment.

In the preliminary settlement, the tech firm denies any wrongdoing, as well as claims that it “recorded, disclosed to third parties, or failed to delete, conversations recorded as the result of a Siri activation” without consent.

Apple’s lawyers also say they will confirm they have “permanently deleted individual Siri audio recordings collected by Apple prior to October 2019”.

But the claimants say the tech firm recorded people who activated the virtual assistant unintentionally – without using the phrase “Hey, Siri” to wake it.

They say advertisers who received the recordings could then look for keywords in them to better target ads.

• Per Forbes, Meta (the owner of Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and other things) has added “AI Generated Users” to their application user bases.

Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, tells London’s Financial Times, “We expect these AIs to actually exist on our platforms in the same way that [human] accounts do.”

So, now we’re going to have non-human users using social media owned by Meta, interacting with regular users. And let’s not get into my feelings around that profile summary shown in the screenshot.

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• Per Windows Central, Bluesky added nearly 23 million users in 2024, with half of those users joining the platform within the past six weeks.

Bluesky saw a massive surge in users in 2024. The social media platform has become one of the primary destinations for those leaving X (formerly Twitter). This year, 22.9 million people signed up for Bluesky. Over half of those new users (over 13 million) joined the platform in just the last month and a half.

Welp, look what happened after the idiotic results of the U.S. Presidential Election.

2025 is going to be a very, let’s go with interesting year, especially in the tech space. As FAANG* continues to use “A.I.” as a solution looking for a problem, we’ll probably see record temperatures as the “A.I.” industries continue to need more and more energy for these ‘solutions’.

^{* I also learned this week that FAANG stands for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.}