Live Rewind, for example, has very clearly been designed from the ground up with privacy in mind, to the extent that its usefulness is frequently limited by such considerations. The tiny 15-second listening window, the limited physical range, the lack of speaker attribution, the inability to screenshot transcripts: all mildly annoying for good-faith users, and devastating for bad actors and eavesdroppers. Yes, these features listen in on you and the people around you. But they do so in the most privacy-friendly way you can imagine.
Apple has long marketed itself as the pro-privacy tech company, but the privacy measures in Audio Intelligence are hardcore even by its standards. (Live Rewind would be a lot more useful if its maker embraced the creepy tech vibe. I’m not saying Apple should have done that; I’m just pointing it out.) And there’s a good reason for Apple’s overabundance of caution: as a general rule, normal people despise listening tech, and the company doesn’t want that kind of controversy.
We’ve been here before, you see. Any technology that’s perceived as listening in on us without informed consent is liable to stir up a passionate response.
Take Google Glass. Google launched its range of smart glasses back in 2012, and their ability to semi-covertly record audio and video of passers-by made them so unpopular that wearers were called “Glassholes” and, in a few cases, were physically assaulted. Then in 2013 the launch of the Xbox One was overshadowed by privacy concerns after it emerged that the device’s Kinect peripheral could monitor users’ conversations; Microsoft was obliged to reverse a previously announced policy that the Kinect had to be plugged in at all times.
Paranoid or not, many tech users suspect that the digital voice assistants in our phones and smart speakers record what we say at all times, despite makers’ insistence that this only happens when the trigger phrase is uttered. Fairly obviously, some form of listening is necessary for the trigger phrase to be recognised, but the theory is that any other audio that’s heard is promptly discarded. Except when it’s not. “I felt invaded,” said one Alexa user whose private conversation was recorded and sent to a random number in her address book. “A total privacy invasion.”
Perhaps we’d expect that kind of thing from Amazon, whose business model relies on extensive data about potential customers. But even Apple has been caught with its hand in the data jar. A class-action lawsuit filed in 2019 alleged that Siri had listened in on users’ conversations and then shared the results with advertisers. Apple denied any wrongdoing but last year settled for $95m.
