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Get Your Creepy Apple Watch Away From Me!

Reading Time: 7 minutes.
Siri Recap on an Apple Watch

Image credit: Apple

Meta made glasses with a camera on them and the exact people you’d expect to buy such a thing swooped in and bought them up. They even found ways to disable the LED so they could record people without consent and without them noticing the recording light. Creeps, they’ll do anything.

But Apple isn’t going to let Meta have the only creepy device on the market. They just had to find a use for AI and, like just about every other use of AI, it’s detrimental to those who use it and those around them. This time it’s a wearable that’s always listening. The new Apple Watches are always listening. They do this so you can read back the text from 15 seconds ago (because asking someone to repeat something involves icky human interaction), and they create an AI-generated summary of every notable conversation you had throughout the day.

That’s right, it will potentially summarize every discussion you had.

Apple introduced the microphone that’s actually always listening, and it’s not in your HomePod or iPhone, it’s on your wrist. That might make it more sinister than any other device because it’s hidden in plain sight.

Apple’s Live Rewind and Daily Summaries

Apple announced a number of new audio features for the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, including music recognition and recognition of sounds, such as sirens or alarms. The latter is a great tool for those who are deaf or hard of hearing. However, these aren’t the features people are worried about. Apple took the fear that your devices are “always listening” and made it a reality.

Live Rewind will show a user what has been said around them in the last 15 seconds. It keeps a running recording of surrounding audio for the last 15 seconds on the watch and, when the crown is pressed twice, will transcribe the words that have been said and show them to the user. They can then choose to read and discard the text or to save it to read later. There’s no limit to how many direct transcripts they could save for later.

Who Is Live Rewind For?

Listen, I have audio processing issues. Drop a pin in the other room, and I’ll hear it. Try to talk to me in a crowded bar or when the music is as loud as what you’re saying, and I can’t make out what you’re saying. I can hear the people two tables away talking about how frustrating their job is as well as I can hear you telling me you think you’ll go for the orange creamsicle drink next because it’s just so hot out today.

I read lips when people talk, which helps, and I ask them to repeat themselves if I can’t hear them. It’s that simple. I don’t need to constantly record my friends and the people around me to avoid eye contact and ignore them for a few seconds while I try to figure out what they just said on my wrist. Plus, guess what I’m not doing if I’m reading my wrist? Reading their lips! So now I need another 15 seconds of transcription, right?

No. Because I just ask someone to repeat what they said because I’m not a rude asshole. I could see a live transcription and caption feature being useful for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, sure, but this is a recording and transcription, and it’s part of Apple’s always-on recording features. There was a way to do this right to help hearing impaired people. This isn’t it. It’s Apple’s excuse to jam more AI into their products to say “we have AI too!” Which, as we already know, backfires.

Siri Recap: Daily Summaries for Wearable Spyware

Then there’s a far more scary feature: Siri Recap. Siri Recap can create a summary of all the conversations you had throughout the day. It’s an AI transcription, word processing and topic recognition of every single conversation you have with it on. It happens in the background, and, unlike Meta’s creep glasses or even Apple’s own Live Rewind, gives no visual or sonic indicator to anyone around you. The feature can be made to only activate in a particular location or at specific times, so you can make it only record when you’re at work or never after 9PM. All of these have to be set up, and it’s not as simple as what most people will likely do: just leave it on in the watch’s Control Center.

Siri Recap will remove text it doesn’t think as useful, like personal details, ID numbers, hate speech, curse words, slurs, and such. However, it will still include names, dates, plans, and “important information.” It’s a summary, not a transcript, but it’s AI making the decision to record what it believes is important. These high-level summaries will include information you’ll wish they didn’t at some point. I’ve used systems that are supposed to filter out personally identifying information, and still had to make manual controls to filter out information because it couldn’t catch everything. No system, especially an AI system, is perfect.

What Privacy Measures is Apple Taking?

Apple is taking substantial measures to protect your privacy. Not that any service like this could ever be private. But what is Apple doing? First, let’s talk about the constant audio recordings. The new Apple Watches, like the iPhone, has a secure enclave. This is a part of the chip that has its own memory, its own processing core, and can handle tasks without touching the operating system or any apps. The data from it is locked away from the rest of the operating system.

Here, there’s a running recording of 15s of audio. If you’re using Live Rewind, it clears out everything older than 15 seconds as it’s recording and no processing happens to it until the user requests it. Siri Recap will, however, process the audio and build up a summary. Your iPhone’s secure enclave manages the actual transcription of audio to text, but for the rest of the topic recognition, Apple has to use their “Private Cloud Compute.” This is encrypted and secured, Apple can’t access it. The summaries are end to end encrypted and stored in iCloud, so you can access them from any device.

And now we’re starting to see the problem.

If your iCloud isn’t locked down with Advanced Data Protection, it’s possible you’d copy those summaries elsewhere, and those wouldn’t be encrypted. It’s possible anyone could gain access to your information, especially police, depending on how you use the information Apple gives you. Once that information is recorded, processed, and summarized, it’s in plain text for someone to read and do whatever they want with it, including expose it.

No Privacy Measures Can Fix This

Live rewind on an Apple Watch

Image credit: Apple

Listen, if I told you that Flock cameras would still do everything they do currently, but that the contents would be better encrypted on the servers so only police and Flock could access it, would it change your opinion of Flock cameras? Probably not enough to make you in favor of the constant AI surveillance our police state and corporations are attempting to normalize. So why would that work for Apple? Part of it is their promise of privacy, but they can’t protect you from mistakes, hacks, or other unforeseen events. Nothing is perfectly safe, and a constant summary or recording of your information is not worth the risk.

Apple cannot guarantee that, once created, this data won’t leak out. It was Apple’s poor security practices that leaked Signal chats. Holes in Apple’s security are discovered all the time, and the worst is likely the end user. If someone decides to store their summaries or recordings in Google Drive, or emails it to themselves, puts it in their notes without Advanced Data Protection turned on, they could leak them. On top of that, do you want your voice, your words, your every conversation potentially summarized by someone else? Do you really want to put your privacy into another person’s hands all the time? If you had a friend who insisted on bringing a tape recorder to every hangout, every movie theater, every show, would you feel comfortable around them? Would you want to tell them your secrets? Would you trust yourself four drinks in around them?

I know I don’t. You can never have an open and honest conversation with such a person.

Human interaction is supposed to be ephemeral. Our entire lives are blips in time, little bubbles that pop and disappear forever one day. If you spend your days looking into the past, you never move forward. You limit your experiences. Live in the moment. Remember your interactions with your friends. Don’t outsource your memory to AI to tell you who and what to remember, and definitely don’t hang out with the kind of boring people who will want a summary of your hangout after a night out.

There’s Just no Consent. Again.

There’s no visual indicator here. There’s nothing that helps you consent to this. If someone has an Apple Watch on, you have to assume they could be spying on you. We have a right not to be spied on. We have a right not to have our friends turn into listening agents. I’m so tired of every single tech company ignoring that so they can jam some shitty pointless AI feature down my throat. We don’t want to be spied on.

Even if you think, “Well Apple did a good job of making this private,” do you think Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI, or anyone else would? The companies building their AI empires entirely without consent, do you think they’ll respect your privacy now? No, of course not. But Apple has now done the work of normalizing being recorded 24/7, making it easier for other companies to do the same without any privacy protections. Apple opened the door, and many others will rush in.

If you don’t want a constant recording of everything you do out in the wild, make sure you tell these people off. I wrote a blog post, for example.

What Can You Do About It?

Speak out. If we cause enough of a fuss that the Apple Watch becomes as toxic to wear as Meta’s spy glasses then people won’t buy it, won’t wear the Apple Watches they have, and Apple will be forced to either disable the feature or abandon the Apple Watch lineup. I’m sure you can guess what they’d prefer. They previously have disabled features to avoid a lawsuit, they’ll certainly do the same if it means saving the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch is already falling out of fashion, could it really stand being seen as a device that makes someone the least popular person in a room?

At least Meta glasses are more visible. At least Meta tried to make an effort to ensure people would see when a creep was using them to record people. Apple didn’t even do that with their watches. They just turned them into always-on creeper watches. No one wearing one is going to be welcome in situations where privacy is important, and that may include friend groups.

Keep your creep tech away from your friends, while you still have them, and call out this creepy trash for what it is: yet another awful excuse to try to find a use for AI no one wants to invade our most private moments.

Ditch the Apple Watch. Might I recommend a Casio? Or a Timex? Perhaps a Swatch. They’re affordable, attractive, and none of them spy on you or the people around you.

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