Latest Apple Watch Can Grab Snippets of Conversation Without Both Speakers' Consent (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0185594894
- News link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/26/09/10/2221244/latest-apple-watch-can-grab-snippets-of-conversation-without-both-speakers-consent
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/10/watch-out-apple-timepiece-can-grab-snippets-of-conversation-without-both-speakers-consent/5295666
> The [3]latest Apple Watch comes with Audio Intelligence, a set of AI audio processing capabilities tuned for the company's S11 chip. Its features include: Sound Recognition, Music Recognition with Shazam, Live Rewind, and Siri Recap. [...] With the double-press of the Digital Crown -- as Apple grandly refers to the button on its Watch -- Live Rewind takes in an audio stream from the Watch microphone, processes it in a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, and routes the data to the user's nearby iPhone, which runs a speech-to-text algorithm on the 15-second audio segment. The resulting text is saved and the audio is discarded.
>
> The wearer's Watch emits an audible tone, even in silent mode, to alert those in the vicinity and provides a visual cue for those able to see the face of the device. Nonetheless, bystanders alerted to the recording -- to the extent they recognize the meaning of the tone -- have not consented to being recorded, which is a legal requirement in 11 US states that have all-party [4]consent laws .
>
> Apple characterizes its implementation of brief eavesdropping as respectful of personal privacy. It makes that claim in a section titled, "How Live Rewind respects those around you," citing the audible chime and visual on-screen animation. Siri Recap, meanwhile, "summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-level Apple Intelligence-generated notes so you can stay present in the moment and catch up later."
>
> This too, Apple describes as an act of respect. "By design, Siri Recap does not create a recording, does not produce a verbatim transcript, and does not identify and attribute speakers," Apple's technical documentation explains. "The output is a brief, high-level summary, comparable to notes a person might write after a conversation. There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone."
[1] https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/10/watch-out-apple-timepiece-can-grab-snippets-of-conversation-without-both-speakers-consent/5295666
[2] https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Audio_Intelligence_Privacy_Overview_Sep_2026.pdf
[3] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/09/introducing-apple-watch-series-12-with-the-all-new-health-sensing-system/
[4] https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and-conversations
iConsent: Not Included (Score:3, Interesting)
A Secure Exclave is not a permission slip. Apple's protections for raw audio deserve credit. Turning those protections into a claim that everyone nearby has been respected is where the engineering ends and the marketing starts.
Apple's own privacy paper describes Siri Recap transcribing speech on the iPhone, condensing that transcript, and sending the condensed text to Private Cloud Compute. The final output is a summary. That distinction matters, but it hardly makes the conversation disappear. Deleting the waveform does not delete the information extracted from it.
Live Rewind works on the preceding 15 seconds of buffered audio and sounds a chime when activated. A chime cannot travel backward in time to ask permission. Siri Recap provides no audible signal at all, with Apple pointing to the absence of retained raw audio as the justification. Apparently, whether you deserve a heads-up depends on the output format.
The article should also dial back the legal certainty. Consent laws have different scopes and exceptions; "11 states" is not a substitute for examining the applicable law and circumstances. But Apple's choice of terminology does not settle the question either.
The useful distinction is between protecting information after collection and respecting someone's choice about collection in the first place. Apple describes substantial safeguards for the former. The wearer's opt-in does not establish the latter for everyone else.
If your definition of respecting my privacy allows you to silently turn our conversation into saved AI notes, your definition needs more work than your microphone.
Re: (Score:1)
i'm torn between the legal and moral. i recently needed to look up texas laws on it because i needed to record a conversations with a friend and with the police separately. in this state it is one party consent meaning if i am somehow involved i can record whatever without telling them. on one hand the law says we are fine. on the other you're still a shitlord for doing it.
Re: (Score:2)
In California, if there's a reasonable expectation of privacy (such as within your own home), recording without permission is a felony.
Re: (Score:2)
I can't wait to see how many places ban this Apple Watch entirely. First, there's no way this is legal in two-party consent states, and I don't care how Apple tries to re-define "record."
Secondly, I don't think anyone really cares how secure Apple says "Private Cloud Compute" is, no one is going to trust that a device that's designed to "listen" (but not "record") every conversation in the vicinity isn't "recording" especially when it can produce an AI summary of a conversation.
There's no way this Apple Wat
Re: (Score:2)
They may just be testing the waters in the US. If they try to even market that thing in the EU then they are very stupid.
Re: (Score:2)
> A chime cannot travel backward in time to ask permission.
Even more so, as in the EU that would need to be informed consent, including all storage locations, any algorithms applied to it, any decision-making and everybody that gets access and all they might be doing with it. The GDPR basically tries to make complex use scenarios and selling the data impossible. Oh, and consent under the GDPR can be with drawn later for something like this and you then need to delete everything. So anybody activating such a mechanism must be willing to give ID and contact informati
Yeah⦠so? (Score:1)
So can Pocket, that little AI device advertised as transcribing and summarizing meetings. What is your point?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
So can a regular phone. Or a tape recorder. Any recording device, in fact.
Re: (Score:3)
Other recording devices do not constantly record on their own, waiting for you to give them the instruction to do so after they do the actual recording. That is what it seems the spyWatch is doing.
This is illegal in many states. Apple is demonstrating the modern corporate position of "breaking the law is not illegal if a corporation decides it will make money doing it".
EM (Score:2)
We're going to need personal EM field generators.
Great (Score:3)
I just got a Pebble watch, which I like. And likely doesn't do this kind of shit. (it seems a little under powered to pull it off)
But now I feel like people are going to be suspicious around anyone with a smart water.
That said, if more people knew what a MEMS microphone looked like, and how cheap they are. They would not be talking around any electronics. Many of the raspberry-pi knock off boards I've bought have some kind of microphone on them, one had two rice grain sized ones. Maybe that's cool for some use, and it's certainly handy to have more peripherals on a cheap development board. But if a $35 board can have them included basically for free, then we can assume that anything with a battery or internet connection has one.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, mic's are really cheap and small these days. You mention a pi, and I wanted to be able to detect motion and sound. PIR for motion and a mic on the pi for sound. I don't do any recording, just a test for is the peak more than x times the average level. It did introduce me to the world of tiny cheap mics though. I'd been used to mic's for recording, and those are not cheap, at least not the good ones.
Re: (Score:2)
If you just want the blank capsule, something like a Panasonic WM-61B102B is just $2 or so and pretty spectacular. (Caveat: I am not a musician...) Like you whisper on one side of the room and get a clear recording on the other. Getting a mic based on that capsule is more like $100 and up and at least some of that is justified for the amplifier and case. But if you put it in some existing device, it gets a lot cheaper.
Re: (Score:2)
> That said, if more people knew what a MEMS microphone looked like, and how cheap they are. They would not be talking around any electronics. Many of the raspberry-pi knock off boards I've bought have some kind of microphone on them, one had two rice grain sized ones. Maybe that's cool for some use, and it's certainly handy to have more peripherals on a cheap development board. But if a $35 board can have them included basically for free, then we can assume that anything with a battery or internet connection has one.
The Orange Pi also have them. Or more a miniature regular one. I do not remember since I removed them. But yes, a voice-grade microphone is like $0.10 and a suitable input is already present in many 32 bit and above MCUs. Not very good recording hardware is indeed often basically free to add these days.
Negatively biased article (Score:5, Insightful)
as evident by the quote "the Digital Crown -- as Apple grandly refers to the button on its Watch". The term crown has been used, for who knows how long, to refer to the knob on the side of a watch. Either the writer has no knowledge of watches, or is intentionally making Apple appear "grandiose". Yes, Apple has it's issues, but when an author slants an article, you don't know the reliability of the rest of what they have written.
Re: Negatively biased article (Score:3)
Every article written is like this. You only pick up on it when itâ(TM)s something you know about.
Re: (Score:2)
You have to understand that most journalists end up in that job either because they're political activists who want to push a Narrative or because they can't hold down a real job.
So no, most of them have no idea what a 'crown' is on a watch.
My nearly ten-year-old Apple Watch has a microphone in it so it could be recording all the time for all I know. I don't really have a problem with this if I'd have to press the crown twice to trigger it, unless it accidentally gets pressed while shagging or something.
creep glasses, creep watches, creep TVs (Score:2)
I hate the future.
Welcome to the machine... its alright we know where you've been.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. Assholes getting rich (or richer) enabling creepy people. Not good.
Precious Privacy (Score:2)
Listening to a podcast recently, there was an ad for "Plaud", which is apparently a small device that records audio, and using AI, can be used to list the action points from a meeting, etc. The ad noted that you can asking it about meetings in the past.
There was a recent post on Slashdot about Flock cameras, and the backlash from people who dislike them.
With the spread of all these devices that record audio and video, it is going to become quite difficult to "opt out" of being recorded for privacy reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
> This expectation of privacy in public spaces is extremely new.
Not, it's not. Thirty years ago people could do things in public and know that people who didn't know them wouldn't know who they were and it was highly unlikely that people would be filming or recording them (and if they were then it was pretty obvious as cameras and tape recorders were still quite large).
It's only that last 20-30 years that people have decided that they have the right to record everything you do and make it available to th
Adversarial noise (Score:2)
There are methods to add noise patterns to audio that are imperceptible to humans but cause AI to go apeshit, such as misidentifying rock music as classical or transcribing speech as something completely different from what is said.
I wonder what the practicalities might be to deploy this form of attack in an area around you when having a conversation you with to keep private. Probably would not be inaudible when played through a speaker (unlike data implanted in audio recordings) but maybe masked? Listen to
Most gadgets do (Score:2)
Phones, tablets, desktops & laptops, amazons smart speakers, theyâ(TM)re all snitches
Re: (Score:2)
Laptops? No. Unless you explicitly record or have some voice-command software running (or some malware that captures), the mic is off. Same for phones.
Hence illegal to use in the EU (Score:2)
And illegal to sell or own in Germany.
You would think that Apple has at least one EU data-protection lawyer on staff. Apparently not. Or they are testing things out.
Accounting for Gen.. *buffering * (Score:2)
> "Live Rewind lets you instantly see the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text"
I take this is supposed to be the feature to help those who perpetually suffer from
* buffering *
* buffering *
"Wait..wut?"
(Yeah. That stupid shit.)
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm. That would require these people to be able to read and understand. Not sure that works.