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Comment by Espressosaurus

2 months ago

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?

14 comments

Espressosaurus

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bryanrasmussen  2 months ago

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.

  • jsw97  2 months ago

    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.

    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:

        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.

    • skinfaxi  2 months ago

      > This may become a case of we don't enforce the laws against large companies.

      Why would Apple be a party here at all? Would Sony be a party if someone records another with a walkman?

      6 replies →

    • bryanrasmussen  2 months ago

      since they didn't specify a specific state I suppose it probably varies, but yeah, there is obviously one case in which it looks like a pretty clear cut violation.

j16sdiz  2 months ago

It is "not stored" "not recorded".

  • concinds  2 months ago

    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.