By Glenn Fleishman

September 10, 2026 5:13 PM PT

Should your Apple Watch always be listening?

At my gym, all the signs are handwritten and friendly. In one section, a sign asks members not to drop their weights because there are downstairs neighbors.¹ In the bathrooms, reminders to flush and wash hands. But throughout the gym, signs say—more directly—no live streaming. Other signs ask people to exercise consideration when recording their routines for themselves or their coaches to ensure nobody else is in their sight lines. Privacy in the gym is paramount to ensure everyone is not self-conscious and is comfortable.

I was thinking of my gym when I heard about Live Rewind and Siri Recap in the just-announced Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4. These are two of the four flagship Audio Intelligence features launching in beta later this year. Both of these tools record audio continuously. Live Rewind lets you double-press the Digital Crown to receive a transcription of the last 15 seconds of conversation. Siri Recap takes notes on what it hears throughout the day and provides Apple Intelligence-generated summaries.

Both features have, understandably, freaked people out, made them angry, or caused them to shrug in resignation. Surely Apple is exaggerating the privacy protections it explains on the same page it describes the features! And if Apple is all in on recording us all the time without our consent or knowledge whenever one of its devices is nearby, the privacy game is over, isn’t it!? Everything becomes fodder for the machine; private conversations are immutable; the future is surveillance!

I’m not one for extremes, and I’ve studied Apple’s privacy and security provisions and mistakes for nearly 30 years. But I have concerns about these features from social, political, safety, and legal standpoints. Let me tackle the privacy and security first.

Hush, now

When Apple announced Private Cloud Compute in 2024, it was interesting, but it felt academic because it didn’t then release a Siri worth worrying about. In 2026, the PCC expansion with Siri AI is much more important, as Siri may send huge amounts of our personal information to the cloud to provide better answers derived from our data.²

After studying Apple’s details on PCC, I felt reassured. This is partly because one of Apple’s five pillars of PCC integrity is transparency. This is unlike many previous claims by Apple that it would be transparent. Here, they’ve stated exactly what will be available to researchers, and one researcher already found a flaw and was awarded the highest Apple bounty—$150,000. The other pillars include end-to-end encryption, barring access by Apple or other parties through cryptographic design, and no way for an external (or internal!) party to determine which PCC server is processing an individual’s data.

Apple’s promises with Audio Intelligence are somewhat different, though I find them a valid approach to minimizing invasions of one’s privacy and an attempt to reduce violations of other people’s personal sphere. Here are the fundamentals for Live Rewind and Siri Recap:

• The features are opt-in and can be entirely disabled (with a big asterisk, which I discuss in the next section). Live Rewind has to be triggered before it can access a 15-second recording window. Siri Recap must be enabled. This contrasts with Apple Intelligence in the version 27 releases, where, unlike earlier iterations, you cannot disable Apple Intelligence.³

• Audio isn’t recorded, nor is it stored, nor is a transcript made. As it is captured, the audio is not accessible to you, watchOS or iOS, apps, or Apple. Apple achieves this by using the Secure Exclave to process audio; after processing, the audio is immediately discarded.⁴

• All of the audio processing happens on your Apple Watch and iPhone. That prevents leakage. If you engage Siri, however, some portion of the Live Rewind text could be sent to PCC under the same security protections. (Apple says “will.”)

• Siri Recap uses PCC. The process is complicated, exposing as little information as possible within the already secured PCC environment.

• iCloud syncing is end-to-end encrypted. You don’t need to enable Advanced Data Protection (ADP).

• Siri Recap deletes summaries after seven days; Live Rewind’s 15-second text snippets are deleted within 30 seconds after the Apple Watch display dims. You can save Siri Recaps or export them. With Live Rewind, they are retained within the Siri app if you choose to save them or ask Siri about the text.

From a design standpoint, these measures all feel well thought out to prevent all of the egregious use cases one might imagine: Unwanted recordings! Apple analyzing our conversations to sell us stuff (or sell to third parties)! Leakage that would allow friends or strangers to access summaries, snippets, or conversations, including via internet cloud storage!

And yet. I find the above fits into the meme of “My ‘An explanation of how the Apple Watch recording what you are saying is kept private and anonymous’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.”

The right to be unheard

When I’m out in public in the United States, courts have found that in most situations, I have little right to privacy. But then you can shave that down. If a neighbor points a camera from their house at my unfenced front lawn, visible from the street?Generally legal, with some exceptions related to harassment or intimidation. But if a camera points into my house through a window or into a fenced area of my property, most jurisdictions find that “not cool” (a legal term).

The audio side of this is very different. My state of Washington, for instance, is an “all-party consent” state; some states are “one-party consent” or have different rules. “One party” means anyone in the conversation (on a phone, in person, via videoconferencing, etc.) can consent, so they can record audio or have a device or system do it for them. In Washington and other all-party states, every person being recorded must consent, or it is illegal and actionable. (Recording across state lines or internationally becomes complicated.)

The company says it’s not “recording” or “storing” audio. But it is capturing it. Shockingly, I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t provide a legal analysis. (Presumably many privacy-focused organizations are doing deep reads of state-level statutes.) But the gut check is what I’m really going for, anyway: do these two features have the feeling of being recorded without one’s permission, even if Apple is trying to mitigate both the technical reality and the sense of it?

On the technical side, it appears that you have to enable each feature in the Watch app on the paired iPhone. Live Rewind requires enabling Siri: Live Rewind: Double Click Digital Crown. You can schedule Siri Recap by time, trigger it or turn it off using a location, or enable or disable it manually, such as through Control Center.

So let’s do the vibe check.

Live Rewind appears to be buffering audio at all times in anticipation of needing to transcribe the last 15 seconds. Apple says Live Rewind is designed to alert those around you that you’re replaying audio: when you double-click the Digital Crown, a chime sounds (ignoring any of your settings) as the Apple Watch’s entire screen is taken over with an animation that includes a microphone indicator.

However, unless Live Rewind is also a literal Time Machine, this doesn’t feel right. People are being warned 15 seconds after their audio is captured. (If Apple doesn’t mean that, it needs to clarify.) Further, it assumes that people will be keyed in to someone’s smartwatch making sounds and flashing images they should be paying attention to.

There’s also no “stop recording” option: if you’re being recorded by Live Rewind, you as an unrelated party—a waiter, a friend, a stranger, someone nearby, a celebrity—have no way to say “no.”

Siri Recap ostensibly is capturing audio whenever it’s active in any of the circumstances above. There’s no indication to other people that it’s running at all, and no one except the user can opt out.

Apple’s mitigations here include that no speaker is attributed, though Siri Recap identifies and anonymously labels different voices.

With Siri Recap, an Apple Watch automatically discards “potentially harmful content.” Apple defines this as content that “promotes self-harm or hateful speech, and sensitive information, such as financial data, government-assigned identifiers, authentication data, and certain personal identifiers.” I’m not sure this list is a strong argument for Siri Recap.

When using a public or private space, there should be a compelling case, even with the protections enumerated. There are already many kinds of assistive technology used by people with many kinds of disabilities to let them function better in a world often hostile to people with no or low vision or hearing.

However, the assistive case isn’t what defines Live Rewind, a useful feature of convenience that has massive privacy implications despite the way data is captured and stored. And it doesn’t help with Siri Recap at all. Siri Recap is just “life recording” without the label attached, since no audio or video is retained, and only 0.01% of a day’s conversation will likely be summarized.

These features feel like they were designed in a lab and passed through to production without enough people wondering, “Will this provoke a tremendous backlash because of the gaps in privacy that are relatively obvious?”

It’s a jungle, Jim

The best way I can conclude my analysis is by quoting Apple:

Be mindful of those around you. While audio is not recorded and stored, and no speakers are attributed, consider those around you where conversations might be private or sensitive.

Given that Apple has to warn of this, it’s the surest sign the features shouldn’t be released in this form. Apple repeats the form of the warning I see regularly at my gym… but apparently it isn’t heeding it.

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His current books in preparation, which you can pre-order, are Flong Time, No See, and That One Matt Bors Comic. Other books include Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

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