Comment by robviren
16 hours ago
On what legal footing does this recap feature stand? In fairly certain there are a non-zero amount of laws prohibiting audio recording without consent. And this wrist mounted always listening thing is likely to end up in a lot of places it should not. Probably burried in the end user agreement that it is 100% the users fault.
> In fairly certain there are a non-zero amount of laws prohibiting audio recording without consent
But it's not audio recording. It's a text (which is obtained from an audio by a not so accurate system and thus not admissible in court).
> On what legal footing does this recap feature stand?
It's not a crime if you do it with AI.
Sad isn't it?
Instant in-memory transcription likely isn't legally considered the same as storing the actual audio. It probably couldn't be used as proof in a court like audio could (for now...).
Probably not, but contemporaneous notes have their own value legally.
It produces "high level summaries" so it's perhaps legally akin to note-taking rather than audio recording?
I wonder how long before we see how well these summaries hold up in court.
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It isn't recording or storing audio, so laws against audio recording don't apply.
That really bothers me. It might be legal for Apple to do this but it's still creepy as fuck.
They're still recording everywhere and sending a transcription to iCloud and they're doing it without consent.
This has the same vibes as those Meta glasses. It's something that people will force on others.
> They're still recording everywhere and sending a transcription to iCloud and they're doing it without consent.
Plenty of jurisdictions are single consent.
Moreover, what is the difference with using your phone to record?
Aren't you just confused about this whole situation? You do know that the human the watch is attached to has ears right? Which record and store the information?
You have no expectation of privacy next to another human in public places.
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Transcriptions count if you’re using them to intercept and record oral communications between others.
The recording doesn’t have to be audio to violate the Federal Wiretap Act.
I am not sure who and why came up with this looks like a mass surveillance to me.
It’s to compete with all the failed AI wearables with the same features.
I imagine it was ran past their likely large legal department.
You imagine so but it would be difficult to imagine a situation where Apple would be liable, so their level of concern would be much lower.
Otherwise, manufacturers of digital voice recorders, etc., would also be fearful.
I was saying the same to my friend.
PA has very strict two party consent wiretap laws I'm not sure this feature would clear.
IANAL but my guess is that they're leaning heavily into the fact that the feature just generates transcripts and does not persist any audio recordings.
Yes, many states in the U.S. have recording laws that prohibit only one party giving consent to record. Aka: I give consent but the other party may not in which case it could be illegal.
Seems like it’s not recording, you can’t access an audio recording.
Just the output of what the AI thinks was in the audio
Also Android has had shazam style always on music recognition for years now with no issues, this isn’t that different
> this isn’t that different
It's entirely different. One is fingerprinting ambient audio against a corpus of known signatures to identify music, another is basically silently monitoring and summarizing every conversation it hears for later review.
I don't feel like my privacy is being invaded by a date's phone telling them what song was playing at the restaurant, but I would be disturbed if their phone produced a summary of our conversation, especially if any vulnerable topics came up.
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The Android feature is matching songs it hears to an on-device database of fingerprints, the other is recording, transcribing, and summarizing all conversations around it. Seems a little different.