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Thanks to Siri Recaps, your Apple Watch is always listening as you go about your day — but Apple may be risking a Meta Glasses-style backlash (www.techradar.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[+] -10 points 2 days ago (8 children)

You’ve been able to just record audio with a watch forever now I don’t see how this is significantly worse than that.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Because just recording audio is illegal in two-party consent states. This may or may not be illegal, depending on how judges interpret "recording" vs AI transcriptions of ephemeral recordings.

    Additionally, even in one-party consent states, doing that is creepy and weird. This makes it even easier for weirdos to be creepy and weird. It also sends the audio to a cloud platform to perform the AI transcription. That is new.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago* (2 children)

    I’d err on the side of it being illegal in two consent states as well but I agree that hasn’t been litigated yet and there’s lots of bought and paid for judges.

    It doesn’t actually send the audio to apple though, according to them it’s sent to the phone, transcribed and “condensed” there with that condensed transcription and some context being what is sent to their servers for summarizing.

    https://support.apple.com/en-us/148354

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/09/10/new-siri-recap-feature-for-apple-watches-can-create-summaries-of-your-conversations-throughout-the-day-apple-says/

    "Siri Recap, the most interesting of the new features, stores a high-level summary of conversations throughout your day. The raw audio never leaves the Secure Exclave, but a condensed transcript of it is generated on-device and then sent encrypted to Apple's servers running Private Cloud Compute, the same technology that powers their cloud AI features.

    The claim is that Apple can't access data sent to PCC, but the way the technology works at some point the data must be decrypted in order to be processed. This makes it distinctly less secure than purely on-device processing. Data is included about context like whether the speech was from a song, whether you were at an event based on your calendar data, and even some location information like your city, state, and country.

    The summary is then sent back to your phone, encrypted, where it will be stored for 7 days unless you choose to save them."

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  • [–] 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Because I can tell it to record what I want when I want, not let it listen all the time. This fucking thing is a shackle now.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 day ago* (2 children)

    That’s not new though, it also listens for Hey Siri all the time like all modern Apple devices have been doing for years. You can also still turn it off if it’s your own watch.

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  • [–] 0 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    Keeping a transcript is definitely new behavior. Siri didn't keep 7 days of anything.

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  • [–] 2 points 16 hours ago

    The comment I replied to said it was different from recording audio because when recording, they can tell it when to record instead of listening all the time, so that’s the only part I’m arguing with.

    In this regard nothing changed:

    • You can still tell it when to record, because you can turn the feature off
    • If you didn’t turn off other Siri features before, it was already listening all the time

    I feel like half this thread doesn’t understand what their devices are doing. Latching on to a new way in which it can record all the time, while dismissing all the existing ways it can already record all the time. How are you going to protect yourself from anything if you can only recognize this when there’s something like a transcript that you can see that makes it super obvious? Most people here are probably already carrying two or three devices around that can record them but just don’t produce a transcript.

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