Wearable AI Devices Raise Unsettled Legal Questions About Consent and Privacy

Chris Thomas, a 43-year-old business owner in Pittsburgh, wears Meta's camera-equipped glasses, a Fieldy note-taking pendant and an Amazon Bee wristband to keep his busy life organized. Not everyone appreciates it: a bystander at a local bar recently told him the glasses made him uncomfortable. "I don't turn it off, I take it off completely because people don't really believe it's off," Thomas said.

Such encounters are becoming more common as tech companies roll out always-listening AI devices. Amazon's Bee Frontier wearable and Bee Eclipse card-shaped device record, transcribe and analyze a user's day. Apple's Watch Series 12, unveiled in September, includes Siri Recap, which "ambiently" takes notes and summarizes conversations, plus Live Rewind, which recaps 15 seconds of conversation via text transcription. Meta's smart glasses capture photos, video and voice notes, while startups Plaud, Pocket and Friend offer note-taking cards and an AI necklace.

The concern is that these devices enable covert recording without bystanders' consent. Earlier voice-activated speakers faced similar worries, sometimes leading to lawsuits and fines, but the new gadgets test untested legal ground. Some can continuously listen and interpret speech without keeping the underlying audio, raising the question of whether that processing itself counts as unlawful interception.

"If I'm giving permission for myself to be recorded... that doesn't mean everybody else around you has given that consent," said Karen Panetta, dean of graduate education at Tufts' School of Engineering and an IEEE fellow.

Apple says its feature doesn't store audio, send recordings to servers or involve human review. 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."

That may not settle the matter. Privacy attorney Colin Zick of Foley Hoag noted that Massachusetts law defines an intercepting device to include equipment capable of "transmitting, receiving, amplifying, or recording" a communication, with "contents" covering its substance and meaning. A device that continuously receives speech and produces a written summary could potentially fall within that language, he said, and the bigger legal risk may fall on the wearer rather than the company.

Daniel Pi, an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, believes New Hampshire's statute is broad enough that the Watch's audio-intelligence features would qualify as an interception, potentially exposing an ordinary user to civil or criminal liability, though he stressed the practical risk of prosecution is far lower.

Michael Stokes, a former CIA officer and senior vice president of emerging technologies at Veilant, said the bigger shift is that people can be surveilled without owning the technology. AI, he said, has sharply lowered the cost of making sense of collected data. "We no longer have these pockets of small privacy that we thought we did in the past," Stokes said.

Aida Baradari, founder of startup Deveillance, is trying to give people some control. Her company's hockey puck-shaped Spectre I scans for nearby devices and sends "adversarial signals" that scramble a person's speech before microphones can process it. "We need to be able to use technology while not giving up our core values or rights," she said.

Source: CNBC