The latest Apple Watch models have some new features: they can listen to the sounds around you all day, transcribe snippets of conversation on demand and write up summaries of everything they heard.
The new features may run into problems with privacy laws, particularly those that require consent from people being recorded, but also with unspoken social conventions about speech.
When we talk with other people, we have some expectations about what happens to our words. Our comfort comes from what information scientist Helen Nissenbaum calls contextual integrity: the expectation that information moves around according to the norms of the setting in which it is shared.
What you say across a cafe table, in a bathroom, at a dinner party, at a town hall meeting or during a television broadcast is said for the people present and for the purposes apparent in that moment. Until now, our ambient conversations were not said for an auto-magical summarizer to fold into someone else’s searchable life records.
Apple can encrypt, minimize and delete all it wants, but data protection isn’t the problem. The problem is that a conversation has been quietly rerouted from the room where it happened into a device, service and product.
Can you just read the document in full? It’s not that long. I don’t want to quote the whole thing.
It doesn’t record to device memory, it’s a continuously overwritten stream of data into the Secure Enclave.
This this absolutely nothing like what an off the shelf recording app would do, and it would be impossible for an app to access any part of this pipeline.
Yes technically there is a transcription step in this pipeline, as you referenced. But again, this is a continuously overwritten buffer inside of a black box where the output is a high level summary.
Yeah it’s in the secure enclave RAM while it’s processed. RAM is memory.
In my state it is illegal to transcribe and summarize a conversation if both parties do not consent. Saying that it records and transcribes and summarizes really quickly doesn’t seem like a valid defence.
This is just trying to find another edge case legal loophole. It’s creating a summary of every conversation; therefore it’s recording, by the very definition of the word. Just because it’s not a word for word transcription doesn’t mean it’s not a record.
Just because every word wasn’t written down doesn’t mean I’m ok with it.