Always-Listening AI Wearables Test U.S. Privacy Laws, CNBC Reports

Amazon introduced the Bee Frontier wearable and Bee Eclipse, a card-shaped device that attaches to a smartphone, on Thursday, according to the report. Both are designed to record, transcribe and analyze a user's day. Apple's Apple Watch Series 12, unveiled in September, includes Siri Recap, which "ambiently" takes notes throughout the day and generates summaries of conversations, and Live Rewind, which can recap 15 seconds of a conversation through text transcription. Meta's smart glasses can take photos, capture video and record voice notes or reminders. Startups Plaud and Pocket have developed card-sized note-taking devices, and Friend offers an AI necklace.

Chris Thomas, 43, a Pittsburgh business owner and livestreamer, wears Meta's camera-equipped glasses, a Fieldy note-taking pendant and a wristband from Amazon's Bee, CNBC reported. He said he relies on the devices to stay organized, pay bills on time and set reminders. "I'm forgetful AF," Thomas said. "My life is so crazy that not having to remember to remember is fantastic." Earlier this week, a bystander at a local bar noticed his Meta Glasses and said he did not feel comfortable, according to Thomas. "I don't turn it off, I take it off completely because people don't really believe it's off," he said.

The devices have raised concerns that they can enable covert recording without bystanders' consent and collect sensitive data that others may be able to access. Amazon, Google and other makers of voice-activated smart speakers faced similar privacy concerns when their devices first reached the market, in some cases leading to lawsuits and regulatory fines, CNBC reported.

Unlike earlier smart speakers activated by a wake word that sometimes stored recordings or sent audio to the cloud, some new products can continuously listen, interpret speech and extract meaning without retaining the underlying audio, according to the report. That has raised a largely untested question: whether such processing itself can amount to an unlawful interception.

Karen Panetta, dean of graduate education at Tufts' School of Engineering and a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, said: "With new technology like this, my statement is always to embrace with caution." She added: "If I'm giving permission for myself to be recorded, or for everything I look at to be recorded, that doesn't mean everybody else around you has given that consent."

Apple says the feature does not store audio, send recordings to its servers or involve human review, according to CNBC. Amazon has said it does not store audio from Bee devices, and that conversations are processed in a secure environment "where no one, including Amazon, can access your data."

Many state wiretap and eavesdropping laws focus on whether a private communication was intercepted or its contents were acquired, not simply whether a conventional audio recording was created, the report said. Colin Zick, a privacy and data security attorney at Foley Hoag, said Apple appears to have learned from the first wave of litigation over voice assistants. But he said the new technology raises questions those earlier cases never had to answer: whether a system that continuously listens, interprets speech and turns it into a summary can amount to an interception if it never saves the underlying audio.

Some state laws define interception broadly. Massachusetts, for example, defines an intercepting device to include equipment capable of "transmitting, receiving, amplifying, or recording" a communication, while the "contents" of a communication can include its substance and meaning, according to the report. In Zick's view, a device that continuously receives speech and produces a written summary could potentially fall within that language even without retaining an audio file. In some states, the bigger legal risk may fall not on Apple, Amazon or other gadget makers but on the person wearing the device. "A non-wearer did not buy the watch, agree to Apple's terms, or choose to have their conversation summarized in the app," Zick said.