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Apple’s always on watch has a declared 15 second buffer for live audio, and a worse scenario of summarizing your conversations for later but.. they tell you about it proudly. They also tell you how they’ve managed to do it while keeping privacy focused.

It’s your choice if you believe them or not, I like Apple and I wouldn’t use that feature.

The pretending that this is the same thing, that Apple is sneaking something past you when they’re showing you that they’re trying to do it right is a bad faith argument.

 help



It’s absolutely not a bad faith argument. They proudly tell you about iMessage being end-to-end encrypted. The part where it’s practically only encryption at rest, because everyone enables iCloud backups without ADP is hidden somewhere in a footnote.

Not even able to enable ADP in the UK these days :(

Wonder if they proudly tell Chinese users (or visitors to China) that suddenly their data is going to a different place than usual, servers outside of Apple's control?

> Apple’s always on watch has a declared 15 second buffer for live audio, and a worse scenario of summarizing your conversations for later

Even if you trust them, maybe as an user you can be ok with that. As a non-user who will talk with people wearing Apple Watches, I disagree being recorded and my conversations with the watch owner summarized.

Where do I disagree for that ?


With the person wearing the watch. It’s no different to someone walking around with a lapel mic

Where I live it’s forbidden so I’m pretty confident that nobody is doing it, at least unintentionally.

Where could I disagree with all my family members sending their dna to 23andme?

Will they surrender logs for a legal discovery request?

e.g. Johnny's accused of something white collar, did he ever make any prompts that suggest how early on he was aware of {X} and further indicate how he moved to frame it?

That's a requirement that varies by country.


Yes? What other answer could be there?

"No" is also an answer. Sadly one which isn't considered by many people :)

Have you read anything about the feature?

They’re asserting that all the audio is done on device, and the results of encrypted so they can’t access them even from the backups.

Unlike… EVERY… other tech company, it is in Apple’s interest to be privacy-focused.

Even if you just have to believe them, which you do pretty much, they’re the biggest name pushing for privacy in the world right now. They make more on selling devices than they make on ads and behaviors. It’s in their interest to not lie.


Read the actual privacy brief. Even though the audio transcription is done on device. For Siri recap, a condensed transcription (which mostly removes superfluous words, etc.) goes to their PCC servers. So even though their servers do not get raw audio, their servers do get transcriptions, which is nearly the same privacy-wise.

Of course, at that point it depends on how much you trust their PCC.


It's their interest to be privacy focused ... to the extend that they don't let other companies have free access to their users data.

But make no mistake, Apple itself is an ad company and that sets all the incentives that matter.


> It’s in their interest to not lie.

Oh, really?


I'm not pretending anything, nor did I imply they were sneaking anything in. It's a bad faith argument to pretend I was doing that, which is ironic but not unexpected from an apple fan...



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