AI Wearables Test Privacy Law and Personal Liability

Chris Thomas, a 43-year-old Pittsburgh business owner and livestreamer, wears Meta camera-equipped glasses, a Fieldy note-taking pendant and a wristband from Amazon's Bee. The devices record his daily life, and he says they keep him on track. “I'm forgetful AF,” Thomas said in an interview. “My life is so crazy that not having to remember to remember is fantastic.”

That convenience comes with a cost that doesn't appear on the receipt. Earlier this week, a bystander at a local bar spotted Thomas's Meta glasses and told him, “I don't feel comfortable,” he said. Thomas's response was blunt: “I don't turn it off, I take it off completely because people don't really believe it's off.”

The Devices and the Concern

The encounter reflects a broader tension as technology companies introduce AI-powered products that listen all the time. Companies market these tools for transcribing meetings, tracking conversations, setting reminders and making personalized recommendations. Amazon's Bee Frontier wearable and Bee Eclipse, a card-shaped device that attaches to a smartphone, arrived Thursday. Both devices record, transcribe and analyze a user's day.

Apple unveiled its Apple Watch Series 12 in September, and it will include Siri Recap. The feature “ambiently” takes notes throughout the day and creates conversation summaries. A companion function, Live Rewind, can recap 15 seconds of a conversation through a text transcription. Meta's smart glasses take photos, capture video and record voice notes or reminders. Startups Plaud and Pocket make card-sized note-takers, while Friend sells an AI necklace.

For people like Thomas, the productivity pitch may deliver. But who else gets swept up in it?

The Legal Gray Zone

Amazon, Google and other makers of voice-activated smart speakers faced similar complaints when those products first appeared. In some cases, those disputes led to lawsuits and regulatory fines. Newer wearables make the picture more complicated. Earlier speakers relied on a “wake word” and sometimes stored recordings or sent audio to the cloud. Some newer products can listen continuously, interpret speech and extract meaning without keeping the underlying audio. Courts have largely not tested whether that processing itself counts as unlawful interception.

Karen Panetta, dean of graduate education at Tufts' School of Engineering and a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, urged caution. “With new technology like this, my statement is always to embrace with caution,” she said. 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.”

Companies have offered assurances. Apple says Siri Recap doesn't store audio, send recordings to its servers or involve human review. Amazon says it doesn't store audio from Bee devices and that conversations are processed in a secure environment “where no one, including Amazon, can access your data.” Those promises may not resolve the legal question. Many state wiretap and eavesdropping laws focus on whether someone intercepted a private communication or acquired its contents, not on whether anyone saved a conventional audio file.

Colin Zick, a privacy and data security attorney at Foley Hoag, said Apple appears to have learned from the first wave of voice-assistant litigation. The new technology raises a question earlier cases left unanswered: Can continuous listening and summarizing count as interception if no one keeps the audio? Massachusetts defines an intercepting device to include equipment capable of “transmitting, receiving, amplifying, or recording” a communication. A communication's “contents” can include its substance and meaning. Zick said a device that receives speech and produces a written summary could potentially fall within that language, even without an audio file.

Who Carries the Risk

In some states, the wearer—not the corporation—may face legal exposure. “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. Daniel Pi, an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, said New Hampshire's statute is broad enough that he believes the Watch's audio-intelligence features would qualify as interception. The law covers recordings and the “aural or other acquisition” of a communication's contents.

A consumer who enables such a feature during a private conversation without everyone's consent could technically break state law. Pi said a New Hampshire user could face civil or criminal liability. He stressed that the practical risk of prosecution is far lower. Proving who enabled the feature would be hard, and he said he would be surprised if prosecutors pursued a bare statutory violation when no one was harmed.

Pi also pointed to a key difference from earlier cases. Smart-speaker disputes often involved devices activating by mistake or capturing speech never intended as a command. These newer features deliberately acquire and interpret a conversation's substance, and users opt in. That difference, Pi said, could shift responsibility from the technology company to the wearer.

The Bystander Problem

Michael Stokes, a former CIA officer and senior vice president of emerging technologies at Veilant, sees risks for people who never buy these products. “I think the bystander problem is really the concern I have — that you can be surveilled without owning the technology,” he said. Stokes pointed to cameras, microphones and sensors in consumer glasses, watches and AI recorders. AI can interpret what they collect at a scale earlier gadgets never reached.

During his time at the CIA, Stokes helped develop the concept of ubiquitous technical surveillance. In that framework, everyday devices continuously generate information that can reveal identities, locations and associations. He said the core shift is economic. Gathering and sorting information about one person once required thousands of hours of analyst work. AI increasingly automates that labor, making information incidentally pulled from nearby devices far cheaper to exploit. “We no longer have these pockets of small privacy that we thought we did in the past,” Stokes said.

Some entrepreneurs are building products in response. Aida Baradari, founder of startup Deveillance, built the hockey puck-shaped Spectre I. It uses AI to scan for nearby devices and emits “adversarial signals” that scramble speech before microphones can process it. Baradari said she watched more AI wearables reach the market and concluded users deserve more say in how they interact with them. “We need to be able to use technology while not giving up our core values or rights,” she said.

Why This Matters:

The fiscal and legal stakes involve less a single lawsuit than who bears liability as always-listening products spread through ordinary commerce. If a state statute can reach a consumer who simply enables a feature, individual buyers carry the burden—even if they never read a single term of service they didn't write. Companies selling these devices rely on privacy assurances that current law may not test. That gap should concern anyone who values clear rules over case-by-case litigation.

Thomas, the Pittsburgh wearer, says the technology lets him stop remembering to remember. The bystander at the bar stopped feeling comfortable. Both reactions are real, and the market will have to answer both. Private innovation, including tools like the Spectre I, is already offering a response. Lawmakers shouldn't rush to regulate before courts have a chance to say what existing statutes already cover.