Everything is spying on you and there’s no opting out

Earlier this month, Apple announced that its new Apple Watches will have the ability to continuously listen to every spoken word they detect and create summaries of whatever’s going on around you. The privacy blowback was immediate and inevitable: Experts warned of the legal risks of using the features, especially in nonpublic spaces and states where eavesdropping laws require both parties to consent to being recorded. Many others called the tech “creepy.” Apple, prepared for the backlash, launched an entire page of technical details in an attempt to reassure people that no, it’s not spying on them. The company claimed that one feature, Live Rewind, uses a rolling buffer that only transcribes the last 15 seconds of speech, and another, Siri Recap, only provides “high-level summaries” of what it captured throughout the day — both without identifying individual speakers. There’s even an audible chime that warns people nearby when the device is transcribing to prevent surreptitious eavesdropping! At least, in theory. To many, these supposed privacy safeguards are cold comfort at a time when widely hated surveillance tech like Flock cameras cover rural and suburban communities, subway…