I hear this a lot but such a perspective elides the novelty (and the actual question):
If I devise a mechanical device that semi-faithfully creates marks that convey information about a conversation - but which does not offer a way to replay the conversation whatsoever - does that constitute a recording subject to two-party consent?
If so, how does this relate to a potential decision to write notes about a call right after as a memo/in my diary?
If so, how does this relate to having my secretary record the conversation in shorthand while listening furtively to the conversation?
The term ''interception'' means to secretly hear, secretly record,
or aid another to secretly hear or secretly record the contents of
any wire or oral communication through the use of any intercepting
device by any person other than a person given prior authority by
all parties to such communication.
The term ''contents'', when used with respect to any wire or
oral communication, means any information concerning the identity
of the parties to such communication or the existence, contents,
substance, purport, or meaning of that communication.
If you get content, useful or otherwise, from the recording, you are violating the law. Unless you fall under one the exemptions, which you probably don't.
So first question, "devise a mechanical device" -- violates. Second, "write notes", no. Third question, "secretary record" -- no.
I would like to raise another question. If I recap a meeting onto physical paper, by hand, is it still considered a felony?
The point I'm trying to make by this exaggeration is that sometimes the information itself is private and recording that information causes issues as well.
e.g. a military personal taking a pen and paper and listing some secret information they know of, this piece of paper by definition is also subject to regulation that is supposed to keep secret information secure.
Eh, I hope Apple continues to provide this and it forces the needed discussion about how two-party consent requirements are nonsensical. Why should it be illegal for me to remember exactly a conversation that I participated in, instead of only being allowed to have a vague recollection?
Laws like this provide cover for abusers and deceivers, by preemptively spoiling objective evidence and making any accusations depend on hearsay instead.
It's not illegal for you to remember, it's illegal for you to record. There's a difference.
For me, I don't want to live in a world where if I say something embarrassing or not well thought out, someone pushes a button and the last 15 seconds is transcribed as evidence. That's a different world to the previous one where it would be someone's word fori it.
As for the fact that phone could already do this, that's not the point. Phone users have to go out of their way to make it happen so it's generally unlikely to happen. The watch feature though is always on and just waiting for you to press "save last 15 seconds"
> Eh, I hope Apple continues to provide this and it forces the needed discussion about how two-party consent requirements are nonsensical
Really disagree on this, I think all states should be two party consent, personally.
> Why should it be illegal for me to remember exactly a conversation that I participated in, instead of only being allowed to have a vague recollection?
It's not illegal, it's just that the other person has to know that you're doing that and consent to it.
Giving them the chance to walk away or to tell a person and their Meta glasses to fuck off is important.
Alarming normalisation. Issues I see off the top of my head:
- Governments can now learn even more about you when they confiscate your device.
- Devices confiscated at airports provide a full history of you.
- Privacy issues: will my conversation with someone using this tech truly be private? Do I have to be careful what I say around everyone by default? Always have clear thought out opinions?
- Personal relations: spouses, friends, relatives demanding to see your history to check up on you and what you've been 'thinking'?
- Society where nothing can be assumed to be private by default
- Slippery slope to a future where you have always on location, cameras, mics for everyone with a mobile device. A complete reshaping of society. Therefore being unable to count on previous societal norms
With "use it or loose it" brain feature, I don't really want my natural recap skill to atrophy to make me dependent on this sort of tech. Not considering that they can secretly ship other monitoring features to constantly scan for certain discussions.
Crazy that this is about to be normalized. Can't help but think the discourse of "they already record everything anyway" of the past couple years (even in the absence of complete proof) has played a part.
Never thought it would be Apple to normalize it either. I’ve been in the ecosystem because they have a proven track record of privacy and security and taking principled stands.
I’m sure the NSA is salivating at this and I don’t trust the current administration not to legislate back doors.
Terrible misstep from Apple from my perspective. This is their “they removed Don’t Be Evil from the website” moment for me.
There's been plenty of evidence that nothing is recorded or sent back, hardly "absence of complete proof". People have identified basically everything coming from the network stack of an iPhone.
This is already normalized in most modern office buildings. There are video and audio recording devices in virtually all common areas. This started a bit after private offices were done away with.
>There's been plenty of evidence that nothing is recorded or sent back, hardly "absence of complete proof".
You may have a different understanding of the word "complete" than the standard definition.
Unless you are claiming the verifiers kept the watches being tested under constant survellance for several years, the proof you are alluding to may only prove that it is not routinely sending or recording data. It does not prove they can't turn it on whenever they feel like it, or when obeying a time-limited and geofenced mass surveillance order.
Quote: "Watching this Apple event tout how iPhones will soon be able to record ambient audio/conversations and transcribe "high level notes" for you. It's billed as private and end-to-end encrypted, but I think the bigger harm is the normalization of always-listening devices. It's creepy and not normal."
I like the idea (we’ll see about the execs). It seems to record what I would remember anyway (“yesterday you and Joe and Anupam talked about going fishing a chose a date”) unless I was distracted.
It’s like the cameras in the glasses. If all they said is what _I_ know (“That’s Julie who worked in the same group as you at company Z three years ago. You also ran into her at the grocery store shortly after you quit Z and it was awkward” but not tell me anything about Julie I wouldn’t know, like spouse or where she now works or anything like that”) it would be an excellent prosthesis. Public figures have humans who do this for them.
Unfortunately the glasses makers don’t understand the difference and make it too general and privacy destroying. This Apple thing might be OK in my opinion..but the reality remains to be seen.
I have prosopagnosia. Glasses that could tell me the name of the person talking to me would be amazing. But not if I have to give big tech data about everyone around me
I have it as well. This is how i explain it to regular folks: most people have an whole neural network dedicated to processing the human face, memorizing its feutures and matching them to the people in front of them. But when they look at trees they cant really distinguish a pine tree from another pine tree, unless the differences are extreme: one is brunt down, or has a weird shaped trunk, etc. If they try to recall a specific pine tree all they can recall is a messy green spiky blob. Why? Because their brain has no neural network dedicated to identifying trees. For us, the human face is as distinguishable as a tree
I would love to have AI that can help support my fragmented memory. As my mom said, I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached. However, this requires a lot of TRUST with the company this access. Apple is the only big tech I could trust but I'm still unsure.
Any friend or acquaintance that recorded without consent would probably not be in the friend group for much longer. If you don't trust your friends in the first place that seems the like problem to tackle.
Good question (I thought I implicitly mentioned it but I guess I didn’t).
Does it matter that we’re talking about “recording” within the envelope of typical human capability? I think that distinction does matter and the summary as described is within that region (note: we haven’t seen Apple’s product in the real world, and we know Meta’s is well outside human capability.
Remembering that you talked with Anupam and Joe about fishing is something people do.
Remembering most of the words uttered, specific phrases, etc (the hoary “on your permanent record” joke from RaRHS) is far outside human capability, which is why we have rules about actual recordings.
I consider this kind of capability a kind of prosthetic, like a hearing aid.
By the way I could have scribbled a little note after the conversation (I do this, though these days in my phone): “Joe, Anupam: fishing”. That’s a straight up (if extremely compressed) recording, but no, I would not ask permission for that either.
Not trying to persuade you BTW, just clarifying how I think about the solution space. But don’t forget that the camera case IS handled by human assistants today.
Surely you'd also have to ban phones and other devices with microphones? All these devices can trivially be set up to record, so if your goal is full security, you should be a no phones workplace.
Agreed, I was finally considering an Apple watch after years of hating how ugly they are but this is a hard pass for me. Back to the drawing board since now I need to consider privacy when selecting a watch brand..
There has always been the myth/rumor/belief that our devices are always listening. I wonder if this is an overton window moment, get people used to a device actually listening and slowly move to all devices listening.
The myth is that the devices are streaming audio back to be ingested into ad/recommendation algorithms, which is testable and generally not true.
I really wish these conversations would shift to the scarier truth: companies collect so much metadata on everyone that they can make pretty good guesses without processing what you're saying.
If you think "oh hey I was just talking about socks, how did they know to show me an ad for socks" it's likely because they accurately predicted based on your behaviors that you are highly likely to be in the market for socks right now.
Facebook/Google have a history of abusing hidden iOS APIs and exploiting weaknesses in the app isolation. It's plausible they found a way to read the output stream of the text-to-speech module from their apps, until Apple was forced to fix it.
None of the companies would have an incentive to report it.
Our devices are always listening, if you have them set up to listen for hail words like "Siri" or "Hey Google," so I think the Overton window on listening already shifted about 10 years ago. The device actually recording/transcribing what it hears is newer, but you're right that it's becoming more and more normalized. With Granola, I think most people assume that any video call is being transcribed, even if there's no indication in the meeting.
Whatever side you come down on, privacy doesn't stand a chance against a small amount of convenience.
Imagine you work in a three letter agency and discover that a certain guy has a vital role in an issue you are investigating. You don't want to just bug his iPhone from now on, you want to know everything he said over the past two years when around his iPhone.
The tech is already included in the iPhone, and storage requirements are in the hundreds of Megabytes, not more. The device is a black box on purpose, and my informed opinion is that they have been logging the ambient text-to-speech since a long time.
it works, in an American context, because the states would have to take it to court and determine if this actually fell under the rules of making a recording.
Argument for, there is no recording stored anywhere thus it does not need consent.
Argument against, there is obviously a recording made. A recording is made and transmitted between devices and Apple and afterwards deleted, that this happens almost real time as the conversation does not change the fact a recording exists for some short time.
Probably Argument for wins, but assume at some point the transcriptions become nearly perfect then expect it to be litigated again.
Argument for only wins because of the weight of the lawyers they can bring to bear. Clearly ephemeral recording for the purposes of processing violates the spirit of the statute at least. And there is this, from the MGL:
The term ''interception'' means to secretly hear, secretly record,
or aid another to secretly hear or secretly record the contents of
any wire or oral communication through the use of any intercepting
device by any person other than a person given prior authority by
all parties to such communication.
Oh wait, they are not helping another person to "hear", only to see the words spoken or a summary thereof. Oops, MGL has you there too:
The term ''contents'', when used with respect to any wire or
oral communication, means any information concerning the identity
of the parties to such communication or the existence, contents,
substance, purport, or meaning of that communication.
So if you wear a watch in a conversation without consent, and then after the fact the watch tells you who was in the conversation or what it was about, that seems like a facial violation. Maybe it falls under a common carrier exemption, but then that puts legal liability on the wearer not Apple.
This may become a case of we don't enforce the laws against large companies.
It is "recorded" by the Apple Watch's microphone, "stored" in the Watch's Secure Exclave, transferred and "stored" in the paired iPhone's Secure Exclave where it is transcribed, then trimmed of fluff words, then uploaded to Private Cloud Compute for summarization and trimming "sensitive info", then back down to the phone, and then deleted off both Secure Exclaves. The summary is synced through iCloud to the Siri app on all your devices, is "stored" for a week, and can be saved permanently.
Apple's marketing screenshots show "Always On - Listen for conversations all day" as one of the four main options when you first turn it on.
That’s actually a good thing to me, wasn’t going to get another Apple Watch anyways - now that’s an even firmer decision now.
My reasoning so far was that I absolutely didn’t get the use out of it I envisioned and, to my even bigger surprise, the integration between Watch and iPhone wasn’t even that good…
And if you want to use the (safety oriented!) CarPlay functionality, you HAVE to enable Siri, even if you'd rather not have the damned thing listening to you all the time.
tap to pay is handy, i would wear something just for that if it lasted all week on a charge.
having a fitness / sleep tracker that i cant wear while i sleep cuz it needs to charge defeats the purpose. doesnt quite fill during a shower.
apple also made it prohibitively cumbersome / confusing to own two devices that boot up to identical instances. why cant i have two pieces of hardware, and whichever one i pick up resumes the session. i dont want them to have two configurations, i want them to mirror each other, if a setting changes on one, it changes on the other.
The most pernicious thing about all of these matters is that now even if you don’t carry or own any kind of device, you don’t have a smart tv or any similar device or even WiFi at all … all of those around you are effectively the STASI spy network of friends and family and neighbors and random people all spying on you passively if not out or ignorance and carelessness.
Short of owning several acres and being able to essentially build a faraday home, you’re effectively going to be in the United Stasi of America.
This is not partisan matter short of the people against the ruling class tyrants that always exempt themselves of everything they impose on others. This started a long time ago and all ad insertions went along with it, that includes those the system has presented to you as your champions as well as those they’ve dialectically framed as your arch nemeses.
> Short of owning several acres and being able to essentially build a faraday home, you’re effectively going to be in the United Stasi of America.
my boss did that, and i'm not kidding. sort of a sport, and not faraday cage for home but for the office area he works in. has spent tons on this as a nerd hobby.
Personally I think it's a silly risk for Apple to do this - but don't Granola and a bunch of other high profile apps already do this? Add to that the number of meetings I'm on now filled with 'John's AI companion' recording the entire thing largely because people enable this nonsense and don't know or care how to stop it. The ship has sailed sadly. The more of this always on recording we have the more society is going to change. We already hear about young people scared to have fun because they might be recorded. Next it'll be people scared to share opinions (or anything gossipy) because it could be recorded and plausible deniability no longer exists.
Highly recommend the short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang. It explores pretty much what an end state of some of these recap devices will look like in the future, and the implications of it on our personal relationships
> Your data is not accessible to Apple either, thanks to Private Cloud Compute, and "independent security experts can verify this promise at any time". Siri Recaps auto-delete after seven days too. Apple is serious about getting users to trust this feature.
Alright. Let say I’m an independent security expert, how could I verify? I can’t, right?
“Management’s Report of Its Assertions on the Effectiveness of Its Controls over the Private Cloud Compute Provisioning System Based on the Trust Services Criteria for Security, Processing Integrity, and Confidentiality”
Maybe it protects the conscience of independent experts. Or maybe contact their media relations and let ‘em know you’ll publish a story on PCC and want to walk their cages, otherwise you’ll let the public know it was prohibited.
This feels like a massive misstep for Apple. It's as if they looked at the Meta Ray Ban controversy and said "I'd like a piece of that!".
I'm pretty sure this is meant as a swipe at OpenAI's upcoming hardware as well as the various (failed) AI Pendant devices, trying to make those products just a feature on Apple's hardware but this seems incredibly risky.
Based on the number of people who have mentioned this "feature" specifically to me today "can you believe..." I have to assume Apple completely misjudged the response to this but only time will tell.
Are we going to have "No Apple Watch allowed past this point"-type signs?
Don't get me wrong, I can see the value in this feature for people in all walks of life but the abuse angle worries me quite a bit. Abusive partners, abusive governments, abusive parents, the list goes on...
Considering leaving you abusive spouse? Better turn off the watch. Talking to friends about questioning your sexuality? Don't let your religious parents touch your phone. Engaging in wrong-think? Better hope Apple doesn't roll over for the fascist government (spoiler, they will).
It always amuses me when I hear people complaining about the privacy issues with Flock cameras (on public roads) while wearing an Apple Watch or carrying an iPhone in their pocket everywhere they go.
which part amuses you? the one where the former uploads all your data to the cloud only to be mismanaged and surveilled or the where the latter doesn't?
This is, I believe, a felony in Massachusetts.
https://www.romanolaw.com/can-i-record-a-conversation-in-mas... (Linking to discussion, not the statute, because it confirms that it is in fact enforced.)
Come to think of it, this would also include smart glasses, etc. And whatever those LG devices were doing. Paging the AG...
> This is, I believe, a felony in Massachusetts.
I hear this a lot but such a perspective elides the novelty (and the actual question):
If I devise a mechanical device that semi-faithfully creates marks that convey information about a conversation - but which does not offer a way to replay the conversation whatsoever - does that constitute a recording subject to two-party consent?
If so, how does this relate to a potential decision to write notes about a call right after as a memo/in my diary?
If so, how does this relate to having my secretary record the conversation in shorthand while listening furtively to the conversation?
Not sure why my comment merited a downvote. In any case, quoting from Mass law:
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Cha...
If you get content, useful or otherwise, from the recording, you are violating the law. Unless you fall under one the exemptions, which you probably don't.
So first question, "devise a mechanical device" -- violates. Second, "write notes", no. Third question, "secretary record" -- no.
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I would like to raise another question. If I recap a meeting onto physical paper, by hand, is it still considered a felony?
The point I'm trying to make by this exaggeration is that sometimes the information itself is private and recording that information causes issues as well.
e.g. a military personal taking a pen and paper and listing some secret information they know of, this piece of paper by definition is also subject to regulation that is supposed to keep secret information secure.
I believe the same is true in other states. Good luck convincing a DA to bring charges against any of these corporations.
Eh, I hope Apple continues to provide this and it forces the needed discussion about how two-party consent requirements are nonsensical. Why should it be illegal for me to remember exactly a conversation that I participated in, instead of only being allowed to have a vague recollection?
Laws like this provide cover for abusers and deceivers, by preemptively spoiling objective evidence and making any accusations depend on hearsay instead.
It's not illegal for you to remember, it's illegal for you to record. There's a difference.
For me, I don't want to live in a world where if I say something embarrassing or not well thought out, someone pushes a button and the last 15 seconds is transcribed as evidence. That's a different world to the previous one where it would be someone's word fori it.
As for the fact that phone could already do this, that's not the point. Phone users have to go out of their way to make it happen so it's generally unlikely to happen. The watch feature though is always on and just waiting for you to press "save last 15 seconds"
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> Eh, I hope Apple continues to provide this and it forces the needed discussion about how two-party consent requirements are nonsensical
Really disagree on this, I think all states should be two party consent, personally.
> Why should it be illegal for me to remember exactly a conversation that I participated in, instead of only being allowed to have a vague recollection?
It's not illegal, it's just that the other person has to know that you're doing that and consent to it.
Giving them the chance to walk away or to tell a person and their Meta glasses to fuck off is important.
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Yes, let’s do something illegal to force a discussion. A discussion that already happened when writing the law…
Alarming normalisation. Issues I see off the top of my head:
- Governments can now learn even more about you when they confiscate your device.
- Devices confiscated at airports provide a full history of you.
- Privacy issues: will my conversation with someone using this tech truly be private? Do I have to be careful what I say around everyone by default? Always have clear thought out opinions?
- Personal relations: spouses, friends, relatives demanding to see your history to check up on you and what you've been 'thinking'?
- Society where nothing can be assumed to be private by default
- Slippery slope to a future where you have always on location, cameras, mics for everyone with a mobile device. A complete reshaping of society. Therefore being unable to count on previous societal norms
Anyone got any other issues they can think of?
We already have the answer to many of these questions.
With "use it or loose it" brain feature, I don't really want my natural recap skill to atrophy to make me dependent on this sort of tech. Not considering that they can secretly ship other monitoring features to constantly scan for certain discussions.
[dead]
Crazy that this is about to be normalized. Can't help but think the discourse of "they already record everything anyway" of the past couple years (even in the absence of complete proof) has played a part.
Never thought it would be Apple to normalize it either. I’ve been in the ecosystem because they have a proven track record of privacy and security and taking principled stands.
I’m sure the NSA is salivating at this and I don’t trust the current administration not to legislate back doors.
Terrible misstep from Apple from my perspective. This is their “they removed Don’t Be Evil from the website” moment for me.
There's been plenty of evidence that nothing is recorded or sent back, hardly "absence of complete proof". People have identified basically everything coming from the network stack of an iPhone.
This is already normalized in most modern office buildings. There are video and audio recording devices in virtually all common areas. This started a bit after private offices were done away with.
>There's been plenty of evidence that nothing is recorded or sent back, hardly "absence of complete proof".
You may have a different understanding of the word "complete" than the standard definition.
Unless you are claiming the verifiers kept the watches being tested under constant survellance for several years, the proof you are alluding to may only prove that it is not routinely sending or recording data. It does not prove they can't turn it on whenever they feel like it, or when obeying a time-limited and geofenced mass surveillance order.
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> People have identified basically everything coming from the network stack of an iPhone.
And there was me hoping it was sufficiently encrypted.
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> People have identified basically everything coming from the network stack of an iPhone.
Scary. Shouldn't it be encrypted?
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Quote: "Watching this Apple event tout how iPhones will soon be able to record ambient audio/conversations and transcribe "high level notes" for you. It's billed as private and end-to-end encrypted, but I think the bigger harm is the normalization of always-listening devices. It's creepy and not normal."
https://mastodon.social/@zackwhittaker/117242363654801025
Yea were they not paying attention during the Microsoft Recall debacle?
They hope they can get away with it, because their fanboys will defend them for anything.
I like the idea (we’ll see about the execs). It seems to record what I would remember anyway (“yesterday you and Joe and Anupam talked about going fishing a chose a date”) unless I was distracted.
It’s like the cameras in the glasses. If all they said is what _I_ know (“That’s Julie who worked in the same group as you at company Z three years ago. You also ran into her at the grocery store shortly after you quit Z and it was awkward” but not tell me anything about Julie I wouldn’t know, like spouse or where she now works or anything like that”) it would be an excellent prosthesis. Public figures have humans who do this for them.
Unfortunately the glasses makers don’t understand the difference and make it too general and privacy destroying. This Apple thing might be OK in my opinion..but the reality remains to be seen.
I have prosopagnosia. Glasses that could tell me the name of the person talking to me would be amazing. But not if I have to give big tech data about everyone around me
I have it as well. This is how i explain it to regular folks: most people have an whole neural network dedicated to processing the human face, memorizing its feutures and matching them to the people in front of them. But when they look at trees they cant really distinguish a pine tree from another pine tree, unless the differences are extreme: one is brunt down, or has a weird shaped trunk, etc. If they try to recall a specific pine tree all they can recall is a messy green spiky blob. Why? Because their brain has no neural network dedicated to identifying trees. For us, the human face is as distinguishable as a tree
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When someone comes up with smart glasses with a fully local setup, I'll be the first to buy.
But I'm not wearing something where the content might get viewed by a random person in Nigeria for "cataloging content".
I would love to have AI that can help support my fragmented memory. As my mom said, I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached. However, this requires a lot of TRUST with the company this access. Apple is the only big tech I could trust but I'm still unsure.
Even if you can trust them don’t, you cannot be sure you will trust them tomorrow.
And even if you trust Apple, do you trust the government will not abuse this access? Forever into the future?
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Would you ask Joe and Anupam for their consent to be recorded?
I doubt it and this is the actual problem here with those glasses and now the watch.
Any friend or acquaintance that recorded without consent would probably not be in the friend group for much longer. If you don't trust your friends in the first place that seems the like problem to tackle.
Good question (I thought I implicitly mentioned it but I guess I didn’t).
Does it matter that we’re talking about “recording” within the envelope of typical human capability? I think that distinction does matter and the summary as described is within that region (note: we haven’t seen Apple’s product in the real world, and we know Meta’s is well outside human capability.
Remembering that you talked with Anupam and Joe about fishing is something people do.
Remembering most of the words uttered, specific phrases, etc (the hoary “on your permanent record” joke from RaRHS) is far outside human capability, which is why we have rules about actual recordings.
I consider this kind of capability a kind of prosthetic, like a hearing aid.
By the way I could have scribbled a little note after the conversation (I do this, though these days in my phone): “Joe, Anupam: fishing”. That’s a straight up (if extremely compressed) recording, but no, I would not ask permission for that either.
Not trying to persuade you BTW, just clarifying how I think about the solution space. But don’t forget that the camera case IS handled by human assistants today.
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That’s going to be a hell of a security risk for us. I think it’ll be a no watches policy in the office going forward.
Surely you'd also have to ban phones and other devices with microphones? All these devices can trivially be set up to record, so if your goal is full security, you should be a no phones workplace.
Given how much people tend to get distracted by their phones, I am surprised most workplaces do not have a phone ban.
Already do that in some situations.
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My device has no microphone. Promise.
How would you verify?
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The irony is that that would probably be Apple's policy with its own offices if a competitor came up with such a feature.
No watches, no glasses and soon no implants....
Agreed, I was finally considering an Apple watch after years of hating how ugly they are but this is a hard pass for me. Back to the drawing board since now I need to consider privacy when selecting a watch brand..
Got a shitty old Casio here. Does the job.
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There has always been the myth/rumor/belief that our devices are always listening. I wonder if this is an overton window moment, get people used to a device actually listening and slowly move to all devices listening.
The myth is that the devices are streaming audio back to be ingested into ad/recommendation algorithms, which is testable and generally not true.
I really wish these conversations would shift to the scarier truth: companies collect so much metadata on everyone that they can make pretty good guesses without processing what you're saying.
If you think "oh hey I was just talking about socks, how did they know to show me an ad for socks" it's likely because they accurately predicted based on your behaviors that you are highly likely to be in the market for socks right now.
Facebook/Google have a history of abusing hidden iOS APIs and exploiting weaknesses in the app isolation. It's plausible they found a way to read the output stream of the text-to-speech module from their apps, until Apple was forced to fix it.
None of the companies would have an incentive to report it.
> If you think "oh hey I was just talking about socks, how did they know to show me an ad for socks"
Or you’re talking about socks because of the previous ad for socks you saw. I suspect ads drive our collective behaviour more than we realize.
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genearlly not true except LG just got caught making it true
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Our devices are always listening, if you have them set up to listen for hail words like "Siri" or "Hey Google," so I think the Overton window on listening already shifted about 10 years ago. The device actually recording/transcribing what it hears is newer, but you're right that it's becoming more and more normalized. With Granola, I think most people assume that any video call is being transcribed, even if there's no indication in the meeting.
Whatever side you come down on, privacy doesn't stand a chance against a small amount of convenience.
It depends what you mean by ‘listening’. If you look at how this actually works - it’s basically only ever looking for a certain waveform
‘Listening’ sort of implies intelligence is paying attention to what is said. It’s more ‘hearing’ than ‘listening’
There are documents on how these activation words work
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Imagine you work in a three letter agency and discover that a certain guy has a vital role in an issue you are investigating. You don't want to just bug his iPhone from now on, you want to know everything he said over the past two years when around his iPhone.
The tech is already included in the iPhone, and storage requirements are in the hundreds of Megabytes, not more. The device is a black box on purpose, and my informed opinion is that they have been logging the ambient text-to-speech since a long time.
How does this work in two party consent states? It seems nuts on the face of it.
I guess they devolve liability onto the user and wash their hands of it?
it works, in an American context, because the states would have to take it to court and determine if this actually fell under the rules of making a recording.
Argument for, there is no recording stored anywhere thus it does not need consent.
Argument against, there is obviously a recording made. A recording is made and transmitted between devices and Apple and afterwards deleted, that this happens almost real time as the conversation does not change the fact a recording exists for some short time.
Probably Argument for wins, but assume at some point the transcriptions become nearly perfect then expect it to be litigated again.
Argument for only wins because of the weight of the lawyers they can bring to bear. Clearly ephemeral recording for the purposes of processing violates the spirit of the statute at least. And there is this, from the MGL:
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Cha...
Oh wait, they are not helping another person to "hear", only to see the words spoken or a summary thereof. Oops, MGL has you there too:
So if you wear a watch in a conversation without consent, and then after the fact the watch tells you who was in the conversation or what it was about, that seems like a facial violation. Maybe it falls under a common carrier exemption, but then that puts legal liability on the wearer not Apple.
This may become a case of we don't enforce the laws against large companies.
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It is "not stored" "not recorded".
It is "recorded" by the Apple Watch's microphone, "stored" in the Watch's Secure Exclave, transferred and "stored" in the paired iPhone's Secure Exclave where it is transcribed, then trimmed of fluff words, then uploaded to Private Cloud Compute for summarization and trimming "sensitive info", then back down to the phone, and then deleted off both Secure Exclaves. The summary is synced through iCloud to the Siri app on all your devices, is "stored" for a week, and can be saved permanently.
Apple's marketing screenshots show "Always On - Listen for conversations all day" as one of the four main options when you first turn it on.
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Siri cannot tell whether I'm speaking English or French. It's not even close.
I have manually corrected "sale" to "sail" a thousand times post dictation, and Siri doesn't notice, it's "sale" always.
This transcription feature is gonna be a sad joke. This is Apple doubling-down on shit that doesn't work, and has never really worked.
Nice, no need for an LG TV anymore
That’s actually a good thing to me, wasn’t going to get another Apple Watch anyways - now that’s an even firmer decision now.
My reasoning so far was that I absolutely didn’t get the use out of it I envisioned and, to my even bigger surprise, the integration between Watch and iPhone wasn’t even that good…
And if you want to use the (safety oriented!) CarPlay functionality, you HAVE to enable Siri, even if you'd rather not have the damned thing listening to you all the time.
Hence why I wear an old pebble to this day. Smart where it matters but not a data siphoning device.
I don’t think it bothers me, as long as the audio isn’t stored… but I can definitely see why it would bother some people.
The device microphones are already always listening, this just makes use of that sound a lot more than just listening for “hey siri”.
Never bought a smartwatch, even when I was in love with the Pebble. I hate having to charge it every day. I don't need notifications on my wrist.
I have a Casio that has a 10 years battery and dual timezone I need when I travel and a TAG Heuer when I need a "better looking" watch.
I don't need to track steps or trainings. Even when I did it was with stupid gadgets like early fitbit bands without displays.
When I will need something that will alert people when I fall (in many years from now, hopefully) I will use a specialized device.
* You don't need a smartwatch. *
You said a bunch of statements about yourself, and then made a statement about me.
You should have concluded "I don't need a smartwatch."
Not everyone has the same needs.
> Not everyone has the same needs.
True, but almost all of the people don't really need a smartwatch :)
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tap to pay is handy, i would wear something just for that if it lasted all week on a charge.
having a fitness / sleep tracker that i cant wear while i sleep cuz it needs to charge defeats the purpose. doesnt quite fill during a shower.
apple also made it prohibitively cumbersome / confusing to own two devices that boot up to identical instances. why cant i have two pieces of hardware, and whichever one i pick up resumes the session. i dont want them to have two configurations, i want them to mirror each other, if a setting changes on one, it changes on the other.
> tap to pay is handy, i would wear something just for that if it lasted all week on a charge.
https://www.swatch.com/en-us/swatch-pay/how-it-works.html
(just the first that comes to my mind, no battery usage)
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Garmin Pay? My Vivoactive lasts about 7-8 days with sleep tracking and phone notifications. 20 days if you disable phone connectivity.
fwiw, the new pebble lasts a week on a charge and it is great. but agree most of the smart features are still useless.
It's great except for the side button durability. I had to throw my latest Pebble out because of that.
>I hate having to charge it every day
My smartwatch lasts 10-14 days.
>I don't need notifications on my wrist
I do, as I hate missing the few calls I get, and I love being woken up by a vibration on my wrist instead of a blaring alarm.
I won't address the rest as it's quite subjective, but honestly saying you don’t need a smartwatch is bordering on ragebait.
The most pernicious thing about all of these matters is that now even if you don’t carry or own any kind of device, you don’t have a smart tv or any similar device or even WiFi at all … all of those around you are effectively the STASI spy network of friends and family and neighbors and random people all spying on you passively if not out or ignorance and carelessness.
Short of owning several acres and being able to essentially build a faraday home, you’re effectively going to be in the United Stasi of America.
This is not partisan matter short of the people against the ruling class tyrants that always exempt themselves of everything they impose on others. This started a long time ago and all ad insertions went along with it, that includes those the system has presented to you as your champions as well as those they’ve dialectically framed as your arch nemeses.
> Short of owning several acres and being able to essentially build a faraday home, you’re effectively going to be in the United Stasi of America.
my boss did that, and i'm not kidding. sort of a sport, and not faraday cage for home but for the office area he works in. has spent tons on this as a nerd hobby.
built a meeting bot once, forgot the consent chime, legal killed it same week
Personally I think it's a silly risk for Apple to do this - but don't Granola and a bunch of other high profile apps already do this? Add to that the number of meetings I'm on now filled with 'John's AI companion' recording the entire thing largely because people enable this nonsense and don't know or care how to stop it. The ship has sailed sadly. The more of this always on recording we have the more society is going to change. We already hear about young people scared to have fun because they might be recorded. Next it'll be people scared to share opinions (or anything gossipy) because it could be recorded and plausible deniability no longer exists.
Highly recommend the short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang. It explores pretty much what an end state of some of these recap devices will look like in the future, and the implications of it on our personal relationships
I’m audhd - I LOVE this. It will be so helpful (I hope)
This feature will not make it to release.
Just like Recall, it's completely DOA.
Apply the test: What would Steve have said?
A: Over my dead body!
Can this be disabled?
You are the product.
> Speakers are not identified
Apple thinks that's a benefit, apparently.
It’s probably for legal reasons
None I know of.
Much more likely brand reputation management.
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Thanks to Hey Siri, your Apple Watch is always listening.
Sincerely, what the fuck Apple?
> Your data is not accessible to Apple either, thanks to Private Cloud Compute, and "independent security experts can verify this promise at any time". Siri Recaps auto-delete after seven days too. Apple is serious about getting users to trust this feature.
Alright. Let say I’m an independent security expert, how could I verify? I can’t, right?
https://security.apple.com/blog/pcc-security-research/
But I have to trust them that they run what they present.
Join Ernst & Young first?
https://help.apple.com/pdf/certifications/en_US/2025-Apple-P...
Maybe it protects the conscience of independent experts. Or maybe contact their media relations and let ‘em know you’ll publish a story on PCC and want to walk their cages, otherwise you’ll let the public know it was prohibited.
I lost count how many times my boss will just flat out lie. This will be a very useful feature.
...for your boss. "Here's the Siri summary."
This feels like a massive misstep for Apple. It's as if they looked at the Meta Ray Ban controversy and said "I'd like a piece of that!".
I'm pretty sure this is meant as a swipe at OpenAI's upcoming hardware as well as the various (failed) AI Pendant devices, trying to make those products just a feature on Apple's hardware but this seems incredibly risky.
Based on the number of people who have mentioned this "feature" specifically to me today "can you believe..." I have to assume Apple completely misjudged the response to this but only time will tell.
Are we going to have "No Apple Watch allowed past this point"-type signs?
Don't get me wrong, I can see the value in this feature for people in all walks of life but the abuse angle worries me quite a bit. Abusive partners, abusive governments, abusive parents, the list goes on...
Considering leaving you abusive spouse? Better turn off the watch. Talking to friends about questioning your sexuality? Don't let your religious parents touch your phone. Engaging in wrong-think? Better hope Apple doesn't roll over for the fascist government (spoiler, they will).
The risks seem to greatly outweigh the rewards.
Um. Apple?
[dead]
It always amuses me when I hear people complaining about the privacy issues with Flock cameras (on public roads) while wearing an Apple Watch or carrying an iPhone in their pocket everywhere they go.
which part amuses you? the one where the former uploads all your data to the cloud only to be mismanaged and surveilled or the where the latter doesn't?