Apple says its new watches won’t save raw audio, but features that can transcribe recent speech and summarize ambient conversations raise new questions about consent, privacy, and how people behave when they know they could always be recorded.
Apple is trying to get consumers to accept, and even welcome, a new reality: Your tech is always listening.
Yeah, I kinda hate this. I watched the keynote yesterday, and when they tried to say recordings aren’t stored or attributed, I thought, that doesn’t much matter.
The keynote sort of shit the bed twice in the same regard. Once here, and once in the AirPods part, during the bit about live translation, just assuming you will wait for the AirPods to read what (it thinks) the person said back to you in their language and then in your language. And then telling the guy “thank you” in your language and he can’t translate back? Okay guys. As for the waitstaff in the Watch thing, that person is not gonna sit there while you appear to read a text on your watch, they are going to excuse themselves and return later.
Bonus: the Watch has had a microphone for years, but you need to pay $300 for the new one (which is the price for the smaller one aimed at women; the traditional men’s size is like $50 more) to get this feature.
Yeah, I kinda hate this. I watched the keynote yesterday, and when they tried to say recordings aren’t stored or attributed, I thought, that doesn’t much matter.
The keynote sort of shit the bed twice in the same regard. Once here, and once in the AirPods part, during the bit about live translation, just assuming you will wait for the AirPods to read what (it thinks) the person said back to you in their language and then in your language. And then telling the guy “thank you” in your language and he can’t translate back? Okay guys. As for the waitstaff in the Watch thing, that person is not gonna sit there while you appear to read a text on your watch, they are going to excuse themselves and return later.
Bonus: the Watch has had a microphone for years, but you need to pay $300 for the new one (which is the price for the smaller one aimed at women; the traditional men’s size is like $50 more) to get this feature.