Nick Heer at Pixel Envy isn’t thrilled with Apple’s new “Live Rewind” feature coming to Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, which Apple describes thusly:
Live Rewind recalls what was just said in the last 15 seconds by showing a text snippet on your Apple Watch when you double-press the Digital Crown, so you can catch something you missed or are less familiar with. You can ask Siri about the content of the snippet or simply save it to the Siri app.
Heer:
Apple swears up and down it is doing all it can to make this private and secure, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. The audio is apparently not actually saved and is, instead, merely transcribed by a dedicated coprocessor. That text is automatically deleted unless the user takes an action to save it, too.
But good luck explaining that to anyone around you after you read back an exact transcript of what they just said. […]
This feels like a glimpse of how Apple will market its inevitable wear-anywhere glasses product. I do not think it does enough to assuage privacy concerns. I think normal people will continue to react negatively when you tell them you have been passively recording them because, outside Silicon Valley, that is considered gross and invasive.
Apple also introduced Siri Recap, which it describes this way:
Siri Recap ambiently takes notes on your conversations throughout your day and creates high-level Apple Intelligence–generated summaries that you can use later to jog your memory, so you can stay present in the moment. Your summaries auto-delete after 7 days if you choose not to save them.
There’s definitely a high creep factor when your devices are always listening. Heer concludes:
This feels like a glimpse of how Apple will market its inevitable wear-anywhere glasses product. I do not think it does enough to assuage privacy concerns. I think normal people will continue to react negatively when you tell them you have been passively recording them because, outside Silicon Valley, that is considered gross and invasive.
On the plus side, these features might help resolve spousal disagreements over who said what when.
Resolve. Cause. Six of one.