Lawyers in 4 States Question Apple Watch’s Sound Recognition Features
Lawyers in California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington have raised concerns about potential violations of eavesdropping laws regarding Apple’s new watch features. These attorneys argue that the Apple Watch’s Sound Recognition capabilities might test state laws requiring consent from all parties for audio recordings.
On September 9, Apple announced Siri Recap and Live Rewind, which respectively summarize daily conversations and provide text of the last 15 seconds of speech captured by the watch. While these features are opt-in and arrive in beta later this year, lawyers believe they may still fall into gray areas defined by state eavesdropping laws.
Apple’s Position: Apple maintains that neither feature creates an audio file, emphasizing that the processing happens on-device and does not involve conventional recording.
Legal Arguments:
- Continuous Processing vs. Recording: Lawyers question whether continuous speech processing counts as a recording under state law, even without a conventional audio file being created at the end.
- Nuances of Interception: There’s debate over whether interception includes technology that interprets and processes speech in real-time but doesn’t record it for later playback.
Apple’s Documentation:
In its Audio Intelligence privacy overview, Apple outlines how both features work:
- Live Rewind: Microphone audio is buffered inside the Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, overwritten by new audio, and a double-press of the Digital Crown sends the preceding 15 seconds to the paired iPhone for text conversion. The raw audio is then discarded.
- Siri Recap: A lightweight model on the S11 chip detects conversations and sends data for summarization, but Apple emphasizes that this model neither transcribes nor records.