At the very least, workplaces will probably not find it amusing "you're recording all of your colleagues, all day, every day?!?!?".
Significant others... well, that'll be a conversation. :D
But yes I agree with you also that this isn’t solely on Apple opening the door.
There is no need to endlessly spy and the same pretty much applies to Amazon, Google and Meta may have a file on you, but in order to have that file, they need to spy. in short there is a big cost of acquisition for them to open up that dossier on you.
Apple or Amazon, in order for you to buy something from you, you have to exchange information in order to complete the transaction, which is no different than any other retailer that you would ever do business with, that isn’t Google, and that isn’t Meta. not at their core. And don’t bring up the Me-Too hardware products that both companies try to sell from time to time. Those are just small side work in the big picture for them.
They are not like Apple at all.
Just read the TOS.
Also related: "Dystopian Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality" sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715934 101 comments
Id prefer a privacy-care company over META, OAI, GOOG, etc.
misleading title!
At least Apple's features are opt-in, unlike most others which are opt-out
Kind of like Meta’s approach to those glasses that record everyone you look at, except without an indicator the owner has to cover up or disable.
Like someone next to you on a train recalling from memory what you said to your boss.
People can usually judge if a situation is public or not easily. With a listening device everywhere that's not the case anymore.
In short: that comparison would be stupid.
It does record audio. A microphone is constantly receiving sound waves and writing them in a digital format in a particular audio file encoding as inputs to a model. That is a recording. I don’t see how this passes legal and doesn’t expose them to class action for false advertising.
This might sound pedantic but it is very nefarious to me that Apple is marketing a device as "never recording" when it is actually always recording. And this is a claim going back to Siri with wake words. Again, they claim it doesn’t record and I don’t see the logic there.
Ah, it feels like this may be the crux of the issue, because that's pretty much what uncompressed audio is. Every value in a WAV file roughly represents the displacement of the microphone diaphragm at time t.
> A human listens. A digital system cannot listen because it must always write
There are two issues with what you're saying, depending on what you mean by that:
1) Transmission isn't storage. When you talk to me you it would be unreasonable to say that your voice is being "recorded" in the air or in my eardrum or even necessarily in my brain, even though vibrations are in some real sense physically present across the air molecules and my eardrum is being physically displaced and my brain is doing...well...some unknown ephemeral aggregation in order to produce thoughts in my head from what you're saying. So if you transmit bits over a wire, and even if you have enough wires to represent bits from many time quanta, you should likewise not call those bits recorded by the same principle of innate ephemerality.
Bits on wire in audio stream at time t ~= position of your eardrum at time t. Neither are reasonably considered storage without persistence, which we have no knowledge of, and neither are reasonably considered on their own to be representations of what is being said.
2) You don't need to accumulate data to analyze it. You can, but you don't need to, and I don't think we know that they are.
You can think of a hash function. A hash function need not record its input stream. It need only record the accumulated influence of the input on the prediction. Storing a running statistical guess about whether you're talking and recording what you're saying are not the same thing.
No really going for the privacy minded consumer with this one are they.
Whoever is concerned about being listened to, we already were, not to start any conspiracy theory or anything, but if the government/police etc were concerned with what you were doing they would tap your phone