Privacy, which companies were once happy to claim was all about personal choice, is now primed to affect everyone around you even more than it already did.
Meta and Google’s smart glasses can record anything the owner is looking at or use artificial intelligence to describe it. Apple’s* Audio Intelligence feature turns every Apple Watch into a transcription machine that records or summarizes your day. Amazon’s Bee devices take that a step further and can record and transcribe everything. Dozens of other companies are introducing pendants, rings, and other products designed to record, transcribe, or summarize everything we say and do all day long.
Privacy has always been a team sport. The actions you take with communication apps, collaborative software, or your cloud backup solutions, have long impacted everyone else you’re interacting with. But moving those choices deeper into the physical world where strangers, colleagues, family, and friends are all now a part of your privacy choices is drastically changing the game.
Tech companies want us to accept a reality where one person’s privacy choices (or lack thereof) means you suddenly need to be an expert in consumer tech who understands the capabilities of many devices on the market, how they work, how and if they signal when they’re recording, and what platforms they do or do not connect to. They believe these ambient surveillance devices that work in the background and are designed to look as normal as possible are the future, while they also expect the owners of these devices to use them responsibly and to notify those around them of their capabilities to act within whatever laws their states may have.
This is not reasonable, nor how consent works in any practical sense.
Let’s break this down by looking at some of the biggest players currently in the game: Apple and Amazon, who have two different takes on transcribing audio throughout the day, as well as Meta and Google, who both have slapped AI and cameras onto eyeglasses.
How to Think About the Technical Promises Companies Make
Ask Apple about privacy concerns and they’ll point to a white paper that explains all the technical barriers between them as a company and the data generated by the watch. Ask Meta and they’ll talk about all the ways you can customize the privacy controls or how certain details, like faces, may be blurred out when you interact with Meta AI through the glasses (but not during standard recording). Google does this too. Amazon will also talk about how you’re always in control, and no audio is stored (though it’ll also let you enable Amazon store integration, so your conversations can directly result in ads for products). And so on across all the companies making these products.
Some of these solutions do a better job than others at cutting out potential law enforcement or company access to this data. There will be a time to dive into these details more deeply, but the technical privacy promises these companies focus on only cover the consumer and user of the device. They ignore every bystander you interact with and their inability to actually opt out. There is no technical protection for you as a non-user of these devices, the person who finds yourself captured by them.
Still, we hope to look deeper into the technical differences between this category of devices soon.
There Must Be Some Laws to Consider, Right?
With something like Apple’s Audio Intelligence and Amazon’s Bee devices, it may be best to treat them similar to an always-recording microphone, even if companies try to claim there’s “technically” no audio recording. These tools still often use a microphone to capture raw audio from conversations and convert it into summaries or transcripts before discarding the audio. Google’s blog post notes that it has whole responsible use part of their Terms of Service where users have to agree not to record others without permission or in sensitive places.
But it’s not just the question of the legality from the point of view of the user. Law enforcement will eventually try to compel access to the data that these products create (either real-time audio or the summaries and transcripts they create). And while some products, like Apple’s Audio Intelligence, are engineered to make that difficult, not every product will be. We know from history that when data exists, governments will do everything they can to access it. There’s no reason to think something would change today.
No Tech and Legal Solutions Will Reduce Social Issues
There is a problem humming along in the background that is impossible to address with technical or legal solutions. If secretly documenting conversations becomes the norm, it makes every private conversation less spontaneous and open. It breaks a longstanding social norm that you will not record and document every conversation with friends, family, colleagues, or strangers.
The companies that make these sorts of products like to claim they’re no different from tools we already have. You can easily record everything right now with a phone or a camera. Heck, you can do so with a camcorder or cassette recorder if you want. And you can transcribe conversations with pen and paper, too. But those are actionable steps we take that both require effort from the user, and are clear to others around us. This new wave of passive surveillance tech is designed to encourage continuous monitoring and hide its use.
Even taken at face value, none of these products can understand the complex social context we all navigate every day. We intrinsically know there are different social agreements we all make when we’re standing on a street corner, at a protest, in a bathroom, at a doctor’s office, at the gym, or in a restaurant. Taking notes in a meeting at work is completely normal. Getting a summary of a conversation with your best friend about their divorce is not. Always-on monitoring of our conversations is an unacceptable burden on our conversational privacy.
Google seems to all but admit this problem in a conversation with CNN when it described the company’s experiments with a notification system that would alert people’s phones when someone was recording nearby:
“And just alerting bystanders doesn’t do much to help, [Juston Payne, senior director of product management at Google] said. “It can actually be weirdly disempowering to you in that you’re like, ‘What am I meant to do now?’” he said.”
What We Can Do About It
It’s easy to buy into the tech company line that these products are inevitable, but we’ve seen so many vaporware products over the years that we should take those claims of success with a grain of salt. We’ve seen entire product categories come and go within just a few years, and if the public doesn’t want this stuff, the tech companies will have to throw in the towel.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we all just have to sit around and hope that’s what happens. For its part, Apple launched its Audio Intelligence features in beta specifically to get feedback, and we think it’s worth taking the time to fill out their feedback forms (or in the Feedback Assistant app if you’re in the beta) and let them know what you think.
Products from the likes of Meta, Google, Amazon, and others might be harder to push back on, but politely and clearly engaging with those who use them in ways that make you uncomfortable is a good place to start. And if you see abusive videos on social networks where these sorts of products are used, report them. If you find these products useful for yourself, make it clear to those around you when you’re using them, and only do so with consent and in social moments where it makes sense to do so.
*Apple is an EFF donor. EFF donors do not influence our agenda or our positions.