[24505] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script from my national radio report yesterday
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Sep 15 10:48:12 2026
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:38:31 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
Message-ID: <20260915143831.GA24757@vortex.com>
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This is the script for my national network radio report yesterday on
Apple's new watch with audio capture features that may be illegal to
use in many locations. As always there may have been minor wording
variations from this script as I presented this report live on air.
- - -
So yes, Apple used to have a reputation of being very privacy
conscious but now probably because of their deep embrace of AI it
appears they're moving significantly in the opposite direction into
the creepy zone.
They just announced their new Series 12 watch and it has a couple of
features that some observers are saying might actually be illegal to
use in some areas. In fact, those features are apparently currently
disabled in the EU and if used in some U.S. states might violate state
laws that relate -- of all things -- to wiretapping. Yes, now we have
to worry about wiretapping watches. Oh my.
So these features are called Live Rewind and Siri Recap, and these
both involve a microphone in the watch that if these features are
enabled listens and processes the sounds around you. Live Rewind lets
you review the last 15 seconds of audio the watch heard as text
output, and Siri Recap lets you see an AI-generated report based on
what the watch heard throughout the day. You can already see where
this is going.
The problem is that in many parts of the world -- like the EU -- and
in a number of U.S. states, there are laws that prohibit collecting
this kind of audio information in areas where you would have a
reasonable expectation of privacy, unless everyone involved -- like
the person or persons you're talking with at any given moment -- are
notified and agree to this process. The live rewind feature when
triggered to output by the user reportedly plays a little chime and
has a visual notification, but of course anyone else around the watch
owner might not even hear or see that or have any idea what it meant.
The Siri Recap feature apparently doesn't give any visible or audio
indication at all that it's sitting there sucking in everything the
watch can hear and feeding it up to Apple's AI cloud. Apple has gone
to great lengths to explain that it isn't really recording audio per
se, rather it's processing the audio on the watch and then sending the
resulting textual content information to the AI for it to generate its
reports.
The potential problem for Apple though is that in states (for example
California) that have so called 2-party consent (actually all-party
consent) laws relating to this area, it's not just recording of audio
that's covered, eavesdropping can be explicitly covered as well. In
fact, traditionally, before the wide availability of recording
devices, wiretaps were usually conducted by law enforcement listening
in real time and manually transcribing what they heard!
It's easy to see how both Live Rewind and especially Siri Recap could
be viewed as running afoul of related laws in various U.S. states and
the EU and elsewhere. The key point is that Apple's insistence that
they're not technically using the watch to make audio recordings is
beside the point. They're still listening to audio and using that
audio to create data that, again for example in the case of Siri
Recap, is feeding into an AI data center somewhere, and it will do
this irrespective of whether all the persons involved in conversations
gave their permission for this or even had any idea at all that it was
happening.
Some states and some countries are indeed VERY serious about
regulating the use of these kinds of audio-based devices and
applications, so despite Apple's seeming confidence about this, it
might be wise for them, as the saying goes, to ... "watch" their step.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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