APPLE has agreed to pay $95 million (£76m) to settle a lawsuit accusing the company of deploying its virtual assistant Siri to spy on people, it was reported on Thursday.

The proposed settlement filed in a US federal court in Oakland, California, would resolve a five-year old lawsuit alleging that Apple secretly activated Siri to record conversations through iPhones and other devices equipped with the virtual assistant for more than a decade.

The alleged recordings occurred even when people didn’t seek to activate the virtual assistant with the trigger words “hey, Siri.”