When Apple (AAPL) unveiled its latest generation of Apple Watches during its iPhone launch event earlier this month, it showed off a number of health and fitness upgrades ranging from improved sensors to new AI-powered wellness insights.
But the company also debuted a handful of Audio Intelligence features that process audio throughout the day. That includes Siri Recap, which the company says listens to your conversations and provides high-level notes, and Live Rewind, which provides a transcript of what was said in the last 15 seconds.
With the capabilities, the Apple Watch joins a growing number of devices designed to listen in on our day-to-day activities. Those include products like Amazon's Bee wearable and Plaud NotePin.
And while such gadgets are helpful in certain contexts, such as work meetings, they also, like smart glasses from Meta (META) and others, introduce thorny privacy questions.
"If you're being recorded and you don't know it, that's a severe privacy invasion. And we are continuing to see newer technologies get introduced whose primary purpose is to do this," Eric Null, director of the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Yahoo Finance.
Privacy concerns
One of the issues with devices that can record audio, video, or both is that they can force people to self-censor for fear of being recorded without their knowledge.
"Our right to conversational privacy must include freedom from other people, without our clear opt-in consent, using technology to document what we are saying. Otherwise, people will self-censor, and conversation will lose its spontaneity and intimacy," Electronic Frontier Foundation Privacy Litigation Director Adam Schwartz said.
"People don't really have a practical means to consent or decline recording … it is clear that always-on monitoring of our conversations is an unacceptable burden on our conversational privacy," he added
While the Apple Watch's Siri Recap and Live Rewind can process audio in the background at all times, Apple notes that users must opt in to use both features.
What's more, Apple says that it neither creates nor stores audio recordings. Siri Recap doesn't create audio transcripts, either. Instead, it provides a broad summary of your conversations without speaker attribution.
Finally, Apple says that information produced via Siri Recap and Live Rewind is inaccessible to Apple and fully encrypted.
That's in contrast to Amazon (AMZN) Bee or the Plaud NotePin, which produce full transcripts of conversations. Meta's Meta Glasses and Ray-Ban Meta glasses, meanwhile, can record both audio and video.
Even so, summaries could still pull in information that people otherwise wouldn't want saved.
"Even if the direct raw audio is not being recorded … the information derived from it could still be very sensitive. It could still have personal information even if it's not the direct audio itself," said Frank Li, associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) and School of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
Apple says its Siri Recap is "designed to exclude sensitive information like financial information or government-assigned identifiers."
The devices all provide a means of informing third parties of when they're active. Apple's Live Rewind causes the Apple Watch to emit a chime, and the screen shows an animation when it's in use. The NotePin, Bee, and Meta's various smart glasses have indicator lights when they're recording.
Still, that may not be enough to ease some people's concerns.
"Unless you have consent from everyone, is this recording information that perhaps someone doesn't actually want recorded," Li said. "That, I think, is a … kind of societal-wide question that we haven't really fully tackled."
Devices like Meta's smart glasses are also facing increasing pushback over claims that some users are using them to harass people.
Prosecutors in Paris, France, are looking into one such claim, Reuters reported. The glasses have also been banned in establishments in cities across the globe, ranging from bars to government buildings.
And while smartphones with recording capabilities have existed for nearly 20 years, the new wave of devices and services is specifically designed with recording and summarizing audio in mind.
"One of the things that companies will often point to is we have phones, we've had surreptitious listening devices for decades now, and these are no different, et cetera, et cetera," Null said.
"But I think the change here is like these products are sort of basically designed to do this kind of recording."
And they don't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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