Pro-privacy Apple could end up as a Trojan Horse for surveillance tech
Macworld ·
Macworld Two of the things I dislike most about modern life are AI and surveillance. So naturally, I was pretty jazzed in September when Apple announced Siri Recap and Live Rewind, two new AI-powered surveillance features coming to the Apple Watch Series 12 . Ain’t that just a kick in the head, I thought. But I was wrong. Or, at least, overreacting a little. As sinister listening technologies go, the Audio Intelligence features are pretty harmless. 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 and clearly 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 . Considering public distrust of surveillance technology and anger against private individuals who enable it, we can hardly be surprised that Apple is treading so lightly in the execution of its Audio Intelligence features. It doesn’t want to be perceived as spying on its users, and it doesn’t want Apple Watch owners to be attacked. (I don’t want that either, to be clear.) The privacy measures in Audio Intelligence are as thoughtful as they are predictable, and I think they will be accepted in good faith. But here’s my worry. Apple is very good at leading cultural shifts, either through marketing clout or its ability to absorb the hits and keep fighting. It dropped the headphone port from the iPhone in 2016, a time when such a move seemed unthinkable. Everyone complained, then it became the new normal and other companies followed suit. Apple performed a similar trick by removing the bundled earbuds and charger from iPhone boxes in 2020, which too became accepted in time. Apple led to the popularity of MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and wireless earbuds simply by entering those markets, and the launch of the iPhone Duo is widely expected to send foldables into the mainstream . So what happens if Apple does something similar with eavesdropping tech? Can the company launder the reputation of this singularly hated branch of technology? Can it get people to accept the idea that the things they say are constantly being recorded and fed into AI models? Other companies will be watching the progress of Live Rewind and Siri Recap with great interest. The execution of these features strikes me as intentional, considered, and ethical. But the fundamental idea is still an unpalatable one: They listen in without explicit consent, and they record in some way what they hear. That remains, for the time being, an idea that would struggle to gain mainstream acceptance. But Apple may be about to help it achieve that. And that’s when it becomes a lot easier for other applications to build a user base. Applications that care a lot less about privacy, and a lot more about grabbing data. Ain’t that just a kick in the head. Foundry Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too. Trending: Top stories Everyone is struggling , says Jason Cross. Everyone, that is, except Apple . 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