Thanks to Siri Recaps, your Apple Watch is always listening(techradar.com) |
Thanks to Siri Recaps, your Apple Watch is always listening(techradar.com) |
Apple thinks that's a benefit, apparently.
> 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://help.apple.com/pdf/certifications/en_US/2025-Apple-P...
“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”
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.
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...
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?
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Cha...
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.
So first question, "devise a mechanical device" -- violates. Second, "write notes", no. Third question, "secretary record" -- no.
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.
Laws like this provide cover for abusers and deceivers, by preemptively spoiling objective evidence and making any accusations depend on hearsay instead.
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"
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.
- 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?
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.
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.
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.
And there was me hoping it was sufficiently encrypted.
Scary. Shouldn't it be encrypted?
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 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.
I guess they devolve liability onto the user and wash their hands of it?
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…
The device microphones are already always listening, this just makes use of that sound a lot more than just listening for “hey siri”.
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 should have concluded "I don't need a smartwatch."
Not everyone has the same needs.
True, but almost all of the people don't really need a smartwatch :)
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.
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.
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.
Just like Recall, it's completely DOA.
A: Over my dead body!
But I'm not wearing something where the content might get viewed by a random person in Nigeria for "cataloging content".
And even if you trust Apple, do you trust the government will not abuse this access? Forever into the future?
I doubt it and this is the actual problem here with those glasses and now the watch.
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.
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.
None of the companies would have an incentive to report it.
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.
Whatever side you come down on, privacy doesn't stand a chance against a small amount of convenience.
‘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
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.
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.
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.
This may become a case of we don't enforce the laws against large companies.
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.
https://www.swatch.com/en-us/swatch-pay/how-it-works.html
(just the first that comes to my mind, no battery usage)
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.
I try to explain it is a lot like the subway scenes from Pink Floyd's "The Wall". Everyone has the same distorted indistinguishable face.
Very likely I have lost a lot of "new friends" and business contacts from walking past not recognizing them.
However, let's be honest. This device will not be your little notebook. This thing will be outside human capability or it would become a joke. This is not you opening a notepad and letting it do speech recognition either. This thing will gather as much information as possible because this is what makes it good and useful. Which is scary in itself.
The tendency to make mistakes but justify them in a very very convincing way is the cherry on top of this nightmare cake.
There are endless ways to use this for bad things and I feel like apple did the same thing, they did with their trackers. They just didn't care.
I'm a SciFi reader and the fact that this exists is no big surprise to me. What is, is the speed in which we got there while simultaneously being in the most unstable political scenery I have ever seen and I grew up during the cold war.
But you’re right to ask about the future. The new CEO doesn’t appear to have the same attitude towards the customer, but rather considers them to be a revenue source to be mined.
They're also not an ad company like the two other major players, Alphabet and Meta.
I'm not kidding about how insidious this is... there's so much metadata to exploit that these companies know who you're with, when you're with them, how often you're there, etc they don't even need to explicitly ask for location because they can pick it up based on network info. In some cases they probably could tell you more about a person than that person could tell you themselves.
I want to record every conversation surreptitiously, because that’s the only way to catch them.
The reason we can’t is because our politicians and legislators are the biggest liars of them all. It would spell their immediate downfall.
We can alreay write notes down for every conversation and then send them to the person involved saying "we talked about X, Y, and Z." That last step is the key because it lets them object in writing if you mischaracterize things. From a "catching someone in a lie" the most important step is that one, because you form a paper trail where the other party can correct or contest what was written and bring that up now, and the fact that they didn't is itself evidence in case of a dispute later. The apple watch feature doesn't do that, it just dragnets everything. Even if it recorded the audio, we are in a faked-audio world so unless you have some signal that they agreed that they said a thing ahead of time, they can always deny it later.
Why does this feature change things? Unless it can’t be turned off?
- The microphone always vibrates from the sound waves
- The microphone is powered in a way that the sound waves change electrical readings in some way
- The electrical readings are sent to another component reading them
- A component receiving the data does some kind of unbuffered processing related to triggered actions (e.g. a clapper or a activation wave)
- Some component temporarily uses a buffer of the data but not for permanent storage (e.g. live, unstored transcription for the deaf or a 'nevermind' after a triggered activation)
- Some component stores or sends data generated by the sound, but not necessarily the original audio or even any attributions of who (e.g. voice trigger web search sends the search query as text)
- Some component generates a stored copy of the transcription with attribution of who
- Some component stores the actual audio in a way that can be later replayed
I'd say this "sounds" like a mess to deal with, but then I'd be worried about falling into a category ;).
What the smart speakers and devices do with the keyword is closer to the clapper than an actual transcription.
If you are worried about such a device being on your person, I think the easy solution is just not to wear or buy one.
Then voice-activated devices came out which (without making a secret of it) started recording after detecting some watchword, of course there were false positives but most normal people didn't really seem to care about that. Again this was used by the most paranoid or anti-technology people as an argument that "see, they're really recording everything like we've been saying all along".
Now a device comes out which explicitly and openly records everything within reach and applies AI analysis to it, and the precise people who should be most against it act like it's no big deal because supposedly this was already happening anyway - while, on the contrary, I think this is precisely the moment where the line is being crossed in a way that will have actual negative consequences on society, and this is the time to take a stand against it.
So ironically we see that the hyper-activistic all-or-nothing attitude is actually working against the very interests that its proponents claim to want to protect.
Why would Apple be a party here at all? Would Sony be a party if someone records another with a walkman?
Apple is banking on the transcripts-not-recordings and notification sounds (can't be disabled) to avoid it, but MA law is more strict.
I doubt "15s buffer" will hold up as "not a recording" and a notification that the recording is used 15 seconds later (during which a person could have walked away) won't be good enough.
AFAIK one problem is that the law is written to punish the recorder, not the provider of the technology. So it will likely slip by until someone makes a claim against an individual using it, and Apple will end up geofencing it.
Not sure why my comment merited a downvote.
However I will respond with what I might expect to see play out:
If Sony makes a Walkman and you record with that Walkman it stays on that Walkman and you have a recording. After Sony sells you the Walkman Sony no longer interacts with you to record something, all of your recording is based on your deciding to record, and Sony has absolutely nothing to do with any recording you make.
If you use Siri recap it moves between devices and Apple analyses it to give you a recap of what was said, obviously it is something that would need to be argued in court but depending on the pertinent state laws it seems reasonable to assume that it would be argued that Apple had the recording in its possession at one point, and that they did something on an individual basis with your recording. Sony does nothing individually with the recordings, Apple does, Apple Analyzes the recording and gives you a recap.
Why would the company providing analysis of illegal recordings be liable if that's the product they're selling? Well, perhaps, as in the case of the MA statute quoted, there is something in the law saying if you do analysis of an illegal recording you are liable. That would be a pretty big "Why" in my experience.
All of this is of course open to legal interpretation because in the U.S nobody knows for sure if it is legal or not until the rulings establish the precedent. However you can often guess pretty accurately.
On edit: I had forgotten the exact content of the MA statute, going back and looking at it, it probably isn't a liability for Apple, but it isn't 100% sure it isn't (I'd say a pretty good chance though) plus as this is on a state basis, there could easily be another state that words things in such a way that it might more likely be a problem for Apple.
There is also an approved human list. And the approved humans carry responsibility and consequence when going into the space.
How would you verify?
This is the part where you repeat the same comment and substitute in modifying the software, opening the device and putting in listening hardware, putting a microphone under your skin, attaching a microcontroller to their outside walls to analyze vibration patterns, etc. Luckily, the world doesn't operate on pedantry. They care about removing 99% of attack vectors, the remaining 1% is covered by you being on the line. If your office permits outside recording hardware, someone 'forgetting' that their device was recording is a mishap. But if it only approves certain devices and finds out you did James Bond-level gadgetry to circumvent their measures, guess what image that'll paint on you.
I imagine this is why Apple has kept the mic array and camera as separate removeable components in their devices when pretty much everything else is integrated.
How would you verify?
If you’re worried about legit espionage, you hold the meeting or do the work in a SCIF, zero devices go in or out period, metal detectors and patdowns on both entry and exit.
I was thinking more of the cases it doesn't find out. 1% fail can be quite a lot.
> If you’re worried about legit espionage, you hold the meeting or do the work in a SCIF, zero devices go in or out period
Well the problem with that is it would bar required phones and other devices.
> Well the problem with that is it would bar required phones and other devices.
That’s the point. Nothing goes in or out except through tightly controlled channels. SCIFs aren’t theoretical, they are in frequent use especially for anyone touching classified info. Large enterprises sometimes use similar facilities as needed for highly sensitive meetings where they can’t afford for anything to be leaked.