Someone else's Apple Watch might start spying on your conversations

Apple Watch is good for many things — wrist-based notifications, health and fitness tracking, quick access to Siri. Now users might soon add “covert spy device” to the list, thanks to new AI-powered listening features that can eavesdrop on conversations like yours, even if you don’t own an Apple Watch.

Apple made a surprising announcement during its hardware event in early September. The company is bringing a controversial listening feature to Apple Watch Series 12 called Siri Recap.

If you think that sounds like a walking privacy violation, you’re right.

When enabled, Siri Recap monitors your ambient environment for conversations through the Apple Watch on your wrist and translates it into “high-level notes” that you can read on your wrist or through a connected iPhone.

There are plenty of places where this feature could be useful. Apple specifically mentioned that Siri Recap is good for taking notes during team meetings at work or parent/teacher conferences at school. However, it can technically be used anywhere — the sermon at church, chats with friends, a disagreement with your spouse. There are no limits, because Siri Recap can hear and summarize everything.

If you think that sounds like a walking privacy violation, you’re right. Luckily, Apple took some precautions to mitigate the dangers, if you choose to believe them.

Siri Recap/Apple Support

1. For starters, Siri Recap isn’t activated by default. The user has to enable it through a new icon in Control Center on Apple Watch before it searches for live speech. Alternatively, it can be set to run on a schedule, like when you go into the office every day or sit down for a specific weekly meeting. But again, both of these actions are intentional to prevent accidental recaps.
2. Apple claims that conversations are never actually recorded or stored, either on-device or in a server farm somewhere far away. However, there is a contradiction in its own documents, which reveal that audio is briefly captured within the Secure Enclave on Apple Watch and iPhone, transcribed into condensed text, and then processed through Private Cloud Compute before the final product is delivered to your device, fully encrypted along the way. Ultimately, you never receive the recording or the word-for-word transcript. You only get detailed notes in the form of a final summary.
3. Saved notes are deleted on a seven-day rolling period, unless the user deliberately saves them for later. In this case, most saved data will simply disappear without a trace, as if the conversation never happened at all.
4. Siri Recap will seemingly understand when it hears personal information — such as banking details or a social security number — and omit this from final summaries.
5. Everything is supposedly end-to-end encrypted and synced to iCloud so that no one but you can access your recaps, not even Apple.

It goes without saying that there are some clear pros and cons to letting an Apple Watch listen in on your conversations every day.

On the pro side, Siri Recap could be a genuinely helpful tool for anyone who needs to remember anything. The busy entrepreneur takes notes at a meeting without lifting a finger. The old friends who get together once a month receive memorable summaries of their time spent together. An elderly person with dementia gets back a semblance of their memory with a recap that tells them exactly what they forgot during a doctor’s appointment or visit from a loved one. All of these things are good and useful to the people who need them.

RELATED: Uh-oh: Apple’s 'private' VPN-style service could leak your IP address

MUNTHITA LAMLUE/Getty Images

On the con side, Siri Recap makes the Apple Watch Series 12 — and maybe all Apple Watches in general — problematic for privacy-conscious people. Essentially, Siri Recap turns everyone else’s Apple Watch into a continuous recording device that could be analyzing conversations at any given time without your knowledge or consent.

Granted, only Series 12 can use Siri Recap for now, but normal people don’t know that. Not to mention, most people can’t tell a Series 12 from a Series 8 or any other on someone’s wrist. That means, in the eyes of people like you and me, any Apple Watch you come across throughout the day could record what you say, and you’d never know it.

So what happens next? Will you assume that all Apple Watches are recording you when you speak to someone in public? Or will you try to forget how surveillance is quickly becoming part of our AI-enhanced reality? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Siri Recap is just one of the new Audio Intelligence features coming to Apple Watch Series 12. Users will also get to check out Live Rewind, which stores a transcript of the last 15 seconds of a live conversation that you can read on Apple Watch with a double-press of the Digital Crown. Next, there’s Sound Recognition, which helps deaf people decipher alarms and sirens in their vicinity. Finally, Music Recognition, powered by Shazam, continuously scans and identifies songs playing nearby.

Siri Recap is expected to launch in beta later this year. With my Series 12 already on my wrist, I will definitely test this feature and report back on how the feature actually works and whether or not anyone has a reason to worry about privacy going forward.

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