AI Wearables Put Bystanders’ Privacy at Risk

Chris Thomas, a Pittsburgh-based business owner and livestreamer, wears Meta camera-equipped glasses, a Fieldy note-taking pendant and a wristband from Amazon’s Bee to record parts of his daily life. The devices help him stay organized, pay bills on time and set reminders. But at a local bar, a bystander noticed the glasses and told him, “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.”

That encounter captures a question facing users, bystanders and courts: who consents when an AI device listens to a conversation, interprets it and produces a summary? Some newer wearables can process speech without keeping the underlying audio, but courts have rarely tested whether that processing itself can amount to unlawful interception.

Devices That Listen and Summarize

Amazon’s Bee Frontier wearable and Bee Eclipse, a card-shaped device that attaches to a smartphone, arrived Thursday. Both are designed to record, transcribe and analyze a user’s day. Apple unveiled its latest Apple Watch Series 12 in September; it will include Siri Recap, which “ambiently” takes notes throughout the day and produces conversation summaries. Live Rewind can recap 15 seconds of conversation through a 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, while Friend offers an AI necklace. Companies market these products for tasks such as transcribing meetings, tracking conversations, setting reminders and making personalized recommendations.

The person wearing a device isn’t the only one who may be affected. A bystander might be recorded or have a conversation analyzed without knowing the device is present or agreeing to that processing. Michael Stokes, a former CIA officer and senior vice president of emerging technologies at Veilant, said, “I think the bystander problem is really the concern I have — that you can be surveilled without owning the technology.”

Stokes said cameras, microphones and sensors in smart glasses, watches and AI recorders can gather information that AI then interprets. He described ubiquitous technical surveillance as a world where everyday devices continuously generate information that can reveal identities, locations and associations. In his account, AI has made sorting and analyzing collected information cheaper. “We no longer have these pockets of small privacy that we thought we did in the past,” he said.

State Laws and the Wearer’s Exposure

Earlier smart speakers generally relied on a “wake word” and sometimes stored recordings or sent audio to the cloud. Some newer wearables can listen continuously, interpret speech and extract meaning without saving the audio itself. Amazon says it doesn’t store audio from Bee devices and processes conversations in a secure environment “where no one, including Amazon, can access your data.” Apple says Siri Recap doesn’t store audio, send recordings to its servers or involve human review.

Those statements don’t settle how state laws apply. Many state wiretap and eavesdropping laws focus on whether someone intercepted a private communication or acquired its contents, rather than on whether anyone made a conventional audio recording. Colin Zick, a privacy and data security attorney at Foley Hoag, said some state laws define interception broadly. Massachusetts law includes equipment capable of “transmitting, receiving, amplifying, or recording” a communication, and defines its contents to include substance and meaning.

Daniel Pi, an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, said he believes the Watch’s audio-intelligence features would qualify as interception under New Hampshire’s statute, which covers recordings and the “aural or other acquisition” of a communication’s contents. A user who enables such a feature during a private conversation without everyone’s consent could technically face civil or criminal liability, Pi said, though he described the practical risk of prosecution as far lower. Proving that a user enabled the feature could be difficult, he said, and he’d be surprised to see prosecutors pursue a bare statutory violation where no one was harmed.

A Possible Countermeasure

Aida Baradari, founder of startup Deveillance, said her company created the hockey puck-shaped Spectre I for people concerned about recording without consent. The device scans for nearby devices and emits “adversarial signals” that scramble speech before microphones can process it. “We need to be able to use technology while not giving up our core values or rights,” Baradari said.