- Apple debuted a new Apple Watch feature called Live Rewind
- It lets you play back audio from the last 15 seconds
- Some observers are worried it could violate people’s privacy
When Apple announced its Live Rewind feature at its Surprise and Shine event earlier this week, many observers were concerned that it would allow you to secretly record other people without their consent. After all, the tool just requires you to press a button on your Apple Watch and it plays back any audio that was captured during the last 15 seconds.
Is this feature a privacy nightmare, one that turns every Apple Watch into a “mass surveillance device,” as some people have worried? Or have people misunderstood what is happening, with Apple putting enough safeguards in place to prevent abuse and privacy violations?
Social media users seem to be divided, with some calling it “creepy and antisocial,” while others pointed out how it could be useful for deaf people or those with autism. Let’s take a look at the facts to find out what’s really going on.
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How does Live Rewind work?
What is this Live Rewind feature that is causing so much consternation? According to Apple, users of the Apple Watch Series 12 or Apple Watch Ultra 4 will be able to double-press the Digital Crown and receive a text transcription of what was said over the last 15 seconds. The company says this is useful if you missed something important, are deaf or hard of hearing, or are trying to recall a tip or recommendation from a friend.
Some people have worried that this would allow you to surreptitiously record other people without their knowledge, then save these recordings to your device for nefarious purposes.
However, Apple explained during the event that the feature never records or stores audio, it doesn’t identify anyone’s voice, and audio cannot be accessed by anyone (including Apple). To clarify matters, Apple has published an Audio Intelligence Privacy Overview that lays out how this feature — and Apple’s other new Audio Intelligence tools, including Siri Recap — works in detail.
When it comes to Live Rewind, any audio is processed in the Apple Watch’s Secure Enclave. This is a separate part of the S11 chip that, in this instance, processes audio. The Secure Enclave is siphoned off from the rest of the device and no part of the operating system can access it or the raw audio it handles. That includes both first- and third-party apps, and not even Apple can get to anything in the Secure Enclave.
Apple’s privacy paper notes that audio is never saved or recorded when you use Live Rewind. Instead, the audio is processed by the Secure Enclave and used to generate a transcript, then permanently deleted from both your device and from iCloud. There’s no way anyone can listen to the audio at a later date or extract it from your device.
Audio flows into the Secure Enclave on a rolling basis, which means that old data is continuously overwritten and deleted when new audio comes in. When activated, Live Rewind tries to send the last 15 seconds of audio to your iPhone. If it can’t — such as if your iPhone is not within wireless range — the audio is immediately discarded. If the process is successful, the audio is converted to text on your iPhone, deleted, then the text is sent back to the Secure Enclave in your Apple Watch.
The saved text stays available on your Watch for 30 seconds after the screen dims, after which it is discarded. You can optionally choose to save it to the Siri app, where it is end-to-end encrypted. This is the only instance where something is saved in the Live Rewind process. As mentioned previously, the text does not contain any speaker attribution.
You can ask Siri about your transcripts, at which point the text is sent to Apple’s secure Private Cloud Compute servers. If you use iCloud with two-factor authentication and have secured your device with a passcode, any transcripts from Live Rewind are synced using end-to-end encryption and not even Apple can decrypt them.
Respecting those around you
What about other people? Will they know that you’re using Live Rewind? Can you use the feature secretly?
Thankfully, you can’t really use Live Rewind without anyone knowing. When you double-press the Digital Crown, your Apple Watch plays an audible chime that occurs even if your device is in silent mode or you are listening via headphones. A full-screen animation also plays on screen and the microphone icon is displayed. Whether visually or through sound, your Apple Watch tries to alert other people about what is happening.
Apple also says that Live Rewind is opt-in rather than opt-out, and you can enable it when setting up a new device. You can also enable or disable the feature in Siri Settings on your Apple Watch or in the Siri Settings section of the Apple Watch app on your iPhone.
Although it would be polite to do so, there’s no way for Apple to force you to ask permission before using Live Rewind. But you might take some solace from the fact that there’s no way for anyone to save or extract the audio that the feature uses, nor can they attribute speakers. All a user gets out of it is a text transcript.
These privacy guardrails go some way to distancing Live Rewind from Meta’s so-called “Pervert Glasses” and their consent-busting data collection.
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