Will Siri Recap make the Apple Watch creepy? Privacy experts weigh in
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The feature, called Siri Recap, lets the new Apple Watch 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 keep an ear out for nearby conversations and deliver “high-level summaries” of what was said. Siri Recap will arrive later this year as a beta product, Apple says.
Alongside Siri Recap, the latest Apple Watches will offer Live Rewind, an on-demand feature that gives you a “text snippet” of the prior 15 seconds of a conversation. You activate Live Rewind by double-pressing the digital crown of your Apple Watch, an action that also triggers an audible chime as well as a telltale animation on the screen.
But unlike Live Rewind, Siri Recap can work passively in the background, intercepting nearby conversations whenever it’s on — which, potentially, could be all the time. Apple says Siri Recap users can choose “exactly where and when Siri Recap takes notes” via a schedule (such as “only at work” or “never at night”) and that the feature can be manually turned on or off from the pop-up Control Center.
Crucially, Apple says that Siri Recap doesn’t store recordings or verbatim transcripts of conversations, but instead “creates high-level Apple Intelligence-generated summaries” intended to “jog your memory” rather than capture everything that was said. In another key caveat, Siri Recap doesn’t track who said what, thus avoiding the use of voice fingerprinting technology.
Apple
Apple has taken other Siri Recap privacy measures, including insuring that financial data and “certain personal identifiers” are “omitted” from the summaries, as well as detailing a “Secure Enclave” in the Apple Watch’s new S11 chip that privately processes audio on the watch itself, while Privacy Cloud Compute handles cloud processing duties in an end-to-end encrypted pipe.
Those measures seem at least partially designed to avoid running afoul of state and federal privacy laws, which offer a confusing and often conflicting patchwork of regulations about what constitutes illegal eavesdropping and what doesn’t.
