Feed: Slashdot
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Title: Latest Apple Watch Can Grab Snippets of Conversation Without Both
Speakers' Consent

Link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/26/09/10/222...

Apple's new Audio Intelligence features for the Apple Watch Series 12 are
drawing privacy concerns because they can process nearby conversations
without explicit consent from everyone involved. "Live Rewind lets you
instantly see the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text," Apple explains
in its technical summary (PDF). "Siri Recap 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." The Register
reports: The 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 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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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