New AI wearables push the boundaries of privacy and wiretapping laws

Chris Thomas is all about AI gadgets.

Thomas, 43, wears a pair of Metaglasses equipped with a camera, a pendant for taking Fieldy notes around the neck and a bracelet Amazon‘s Bee, all of which record his daily life. A Pittsburgh-based business owner and live streamer, Thomas relies on devices to help him stay organized, pay his bills on time, and set reminders.

“I forget AF,” Thomas said in an interview. “My life is so crazy that not having to remember is fantastic.”

Not everyone agrees with his lifestyle. Earlier this week, a passerby at a local bar noticed his Meta Glasses.

“He told me, ‘I don’t feel comfortable,’” Thomas said. “I don’t turn it off, I take it off completely because people don’t really believe it’s off.”

This is the type of interaction that users are increasingly using as more tech companies introduce AI-powered, always-listening devices and features, which have been marketed as useful tools for transcribing meetings, tracking conversations, setting reminders and offering personalized recommendations.

The latest example of these gadgets arrived Thursday with Amazon’s Bee Frontier wearable and Bee Eclipse, a card-shaped device that attaches to a smartphone. Both devices are designed to record, transcribe and analyze a user’s day.

Apple’s latest Apple Watch Series 12, revealed in September, will have Siri Recap, which takes notes “ambiently” throughout the day and generates summaries of conversations. Another feature called Live Rewind allows you to recap 15 seconds of a conversation via text transcription.

Meta’s popular smart glasses can take photos, capture videos, and record voice notes or reminders. Startups such as Plaud and Pocket have also developed card-sized note-taking devices, while Friend offers an AI collar.

The devices have fueled concerns that they could violate privacy, allowing secret recording without obtaining consent from viewers and collecting sensitive data potentially accessible to others.

Amazon, Google and other makers of voice-activated smart speakers faced similar privacy concerns when their devices first hit the market, in some cases leading to lawsuits and regulatory fines.

But this new generation of AI devices is also testing the limits of the right to privacy.

Unlike previous smart speakers that were activated via a “wake word” and sometimes stored recordings or sent audio to the cloud, some of these products can listen to, interpret speech, and extract meaning continuously without retaining the underlying audio. This capability has raised a largely unresolved question as to whether this processing itself may constitute unlawful interception.

“With new technology like this, my statement is always one to adopt with caution,” said Karen Panetta, dean of graduate studies at Tufts’ School of Engineering and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

She added: “If I give permission for myself to be recorded, or for everything I watch to be recorded, that doesn’t mean everyone around you has given that consent.”

Apple and Amazon appear to have gotten around some of the privacy issues that plagued older voice assistants.

Apple says the feature doesn’t store audio, send recordings to its servers, or involve human control. Amazon said it does not store audio from Bee devices and that conversations are handled in a secure environment “where no one, including Amazon, can access your data.”

But that may not resolve the legal issue.

Many state wiretapping and wiretapping laws specify whether a private communication was intercepted or its contents acquired – not simply whether a conventional audio recording was created.

Colin Zick, a privacy and data security attorney at Foley Hoag, said Apple appears to have learned lessons from the first wave of voice assistant litigation. But the new technology raises questions that previous cases never had to answer: Can a system that continually listens, interprets, and summarizes speech still constitute an interception if it never saves the underlying audio?

Some state laws define interception broadly. Massachusetts, for example, defines an interception device to include equipment capable of “transmitting, receiving, amplifying, or recording” a communication, while the “content” of a communication can include its substance and meaning.

According to Zick, a device that continually receives speech and produces a written summary could potentially be in that language even without retaining an audio file.

And in some states, the biggest legal risk lies not with Apple, Amazon, or other makers of AI gadgets, but with the person wearing the device.

“A non-wearer has not purchased the watch, agreed to Apple’s terms, or opted-in to have their conversation summarized in the app,” Zick said.

Daniel Pi, an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, said New Hampshire law is broad enough that he thinks the Watch’s new audio intelligence features would be considered an interception. The law covers not only recordings, but also the “auditory or other acquisition” of the content of a communication.

This could create an unusual situation in which an ordinary consumer would enable a feature built into a consumer device and, at least technically, violate state law by using it during a private conversation without everyone’s consent.

Pi said a New Hampshire user could potentially face civil or criminal liability for this, although he stressed that the practical risk of prosecution is much lower. It might be difficult to know whether anyone activated the feature in the first place, and he said he would be surprised to see prosecutors pursue cases involving a simple violation of the law in which no one was hurt.

The legal questions are also different from those raised by previous smart speakers and voice assistants. These cases often involved devices mistakenly activating or capturing speech that was not intended to be a command. Here, the functionality is designed to acquire and interpret the substance of a conversation – and the user has deliberately chosen to accept it.

This changes the analysis, Pi said, and could also shift responsibility to the carrier rather than the tech company itself.

The broader privacy concern goes beyond the question of who is legally responsible.

Michael Stokes, a former CIA officer and senior vice president of emerging technologies at Veilant, said the most important change is that people can be drawn into AI-based surveillance without owning or knowingly interacting with the device doing the collection.

“I think the bystander issue is really my concern: that you can be watched without having the technology,” Stokes said.

He pointed to the growing number of cameras, microphones and sensors integrated into consumer devices, from smart glasses to AI watches and recorders. The difference now, he says, is that AI can quickly interpret what these devices collect and make sense of much larger volumes of information than previous generations of consumer technology.

For Stokes, this makes the Apple Watch part of a much larger shift in the privacy landscape. During his time at the CIA, he helped develop the concept of pervasive technical surveillance, describing a world in which everyday devices constantly generate information that can reveal identities, locations, and associations.

The concern is not just being able to collect more data, he said, but also dramatically reducing the cost of understanding it.

In the past, Stokes said, intelligence gathering could require thousands of man hours to gather, sort and analyze information about a person. AI is increasingly automating this process, making it cheaper and easier to extract useful information from data that may have been collected accidentally.

This creates a new type of exposure for people who have never embraced technology, whether it’s a private conversation picked up by a nearby handheld device or information collected by a device they don’t own.

“We no longer have these little pockets of privacy that we thought we had in the past,” Stokes said.

Aida Baradari, founder of the startup Deveillance, is trying to give some control back to people worried about being recorded without their consent.

The company created a hockey puck-shaped gadget, called Specter I, that uses AI to scan for nearby devices and sends “mixed signals” that scramble a person’s speech before microphones can process it.

Baradari said she has watched more AI wearable devices hit the market and believes users should have more say in how they interact with them.

“We must be able to use technology without giving up our values ​​or our fundamental rights,” she said.