Your Apple Watch isn’t recording audio, it’s flowing it ↦

Apple's latest features, Live Rewind and Siri Recap, have generated discussion over how they handle audio recording. Apple engineer Dr. Drang highlights the clever linguistic gymnastics employed by the company to avoid using certain words. For Live Rewind, audio from the microphone is processed through a secure buffer on the S11 chip, rather than being directly recorded.

The company opted against using the word "recording" due to potential implications, leading to the use of "flowing" instead. Similarly, Siri Recap does not alert others when recording, but instead uses similar wording to avoid raising concerns. Apple's privacy document emphasizes that raw audio is not retained and cannot be reconstructed, implying that only raw audio could lead to privacy violations.

However, this stance raises questions about the implications of summarizing conversations without retaining audio. This approach, according to Dr. Drang, demonstrates the lengths Apple goes to maintain the perception of transparency and fairness in its features.