We can’t just change the definition of ‘recording’

With AI hardware, tech companies are pushing the definition of what does and doesn’t constitute a recording. For most of gadget history, it’d be reasonable to assume that a device with a microphone or camera is either recording you or it isn’t; it’s either on or off, without much gray area. Microphones capture sound. Cameras capture images. That data is saved onto a device. Sometimes, it’s also sent to the cloud — hopefully with end-to-end encryption — for processing. That data is a preserved instant in time and is therefore a recording.

Perhaps not anymore.

Last week, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple is working on a smart home camera that doesn’t save video recordings. Instead, AI uses the visual data to create text snippets that describe what’s happening around your home. Supposedly, it’ll support facial recognition, but without video footage. The idea is that it still protects some privacy. This tech, Gurman says, is similar to how the cameras in rumored future AirPods will also work.

It’s similar to Apple’s Audio Intelligence on the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4. The Apple Watch has had a microphone for ages, mostly for Siri and taking phone calls from the wrist. Of the four Audio Intelligence features, two have caused the most debate online: Live Rewind and Siri Recap. The former produces a transcript of the past 15 seconds, whereas the latter can generate high-level summaries of the conversations you have throughout the day.

In other words, Ray-Ban Meta glasses take photos and record video, which is stored on your phone. This rumored Apple approach would mean cameras can see you, microphones can hear you — but neither is “saving” anything.

Does this count as recording? Apple doesn’t comment on rumors, but based on how it’s publicly communicated its Audio Intelligence privacy philosophy, I’d argue the company doesn’t think so. Apple says these features don’t save any audio. The raw data is deleted once it’s finished processing in a separate, secure exclave on the S11 processor. Any information sent to the cloud is through private cloud compute and is therefore inaccessible to Apple or third parties.

It’s not just Apple, either. Sandeep Waraich, Google’s senior director of wearables, told The Verge in a conversation that Google is also mulling this concept. What if, he posited, cameras on smart glasses didn’t record data? For example, if the glasses could process visual data in your environment using AI, but didn’t save any footage for posterity. In that way, Waraich argued, the camera could “just” be an image sensor.

By these definitions, something has to be preserved and reviewable to be “recording” you. But wouldn’t any text transcripts generated by a smart home camera or smartwatch count as preserved and reviewable? Or, in trying to make AI hardware more palatable, are tech companies relying on what can be subpoenaed in court?

It might seem silly to argue semantics, but multiple concepts are being tested here.

Whatever your personal opinions about privacy, it’s generally agreed that you can do whatever you want with your own data. Before gadgets could “always listen,” they slotted into public and private spaces more seamlessly. This new crop of gadgets, however, asks you to be a more active steward of other people’s privacy. After all, humans don’t live in hermetically sealed bubbles. We live, work, and hang out in a multitude of environments — some private, others public, and plenty in a gray area. The rules for a restaurant differ from those of a theater, office, or sporting venue. They’re vastly different from a public restroom, even though these are all at least semi-public spaces. Even if you “record” everything you see in your mind, human memories can’t be shared objectively. They’re colored by biases and warped by perspective. Recordings are less subjective and arguably factual.

There’s also the question of signaling intent in the absence of universally understood norms. Take Meta’s smart glasses. They use a white, pulsing “privacy light” to indicate when someone’s recording video. Conversely, the universal color for recording lights is red, so a less tech-savvy person may not even know what a white light signifies. (These are, after all, still niche products.) Even without modification, white privacy lights are easily obscured by bangs and a bright sunny day. This is also a new norm; other smart glasses or AI hardware companies aren’t obligated to signal this intent in the same way as Meta. An AI ring or pendant that records audio or video may have no light at all.

Even more confusing, products that can record increasingly look like products that can’t. That could be exacerbated even further if tech companies begin adding cameras that don’t record visual footage. If we start adding cameras to smart glasses that don’t record video footage, how will you tell them apart from pairs that do? If an Oura Ring — which has no microphone — looks like a Vocci Ring — which does — and both look like regular rings, what is the average person supposed to do?

Right now, hardware seems to be the main focus of the surveillance tech debate. There’s a sense that getting rid of cameras solves the problem. It doesn’t, though it makes it harder to use this tech in nefarious ways. But arguably, it’s not the camera or microphone that gives people the ick. The queasy feeling comes from knowing a preserved snippet of you can exist in someone else’s device with no knowledge of how it’ll be used.

This is where all the tension surrounding AI hardware converges. For AI to be “good” and truly personal in the way Big Tech imagines, it has to know a lot about you — and the people in your life. It has to “see” what you see, hear what you hear, and learn from your day-to-day actions. To do that, it has to “remember” these things. So in some ways, it must record your life and everything that happens in it. The incentives for Big Tech to collect this data are obvious: Personal data is money, money is power, and power is influence. What’s less clear is what society gets from this tradeoff. Vague promises of helpfulness and convenience?

Regardless, it’s clear tech companies have decided to barrel forward with stuffing AI into every existing gadget while inventing new form factors. Right now, it’s most clear in phones and wearables, but these considerations are soon headed to the smart home, TVs, laptops, tablets, and headphones. Likely in ways consumers have yet to consider.

What we allow these AI gadgets to remember will rewrite culture as we know it. This is why we must reach a societal consensus on what constitutes a recording — and who, if anyone, gets to change that definition.