We just got our first glimpse of Apple’s long-rumored camera-equipped AirPods — and they already look like a privacy nightmare.
In a short demo video that MacRumors unearthed from the files of an upcoming macOS version, a man wearing the new AirPods holds up a book so the cameras in the device can see its title.
Then, a voiceover says, “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable.”
“See something you like?” it continues. “Just ask me to save it for later.”
That’s the extent of the demo, but it more or less confirms the rumors and reports we’ve been hearing about the devices for a year now.
Bloomberg has reported that the cameras in the AirPods will “essentially act as eyes” for Siri and its Visual Intelligence features, allowing a wearer to ask things about their environment or, as the clip teases, take notes and transcribe text. Crucially, the camera-equipped AirPods aren’t designed to take photos or video, according to the reporting.
Still, the upcoming AirPods will raise huge privacy concerns once their existence becomes more publicly known. The controversy around Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses — or “pervert” glasses, as some call them — has all but ensured that camera-equipped wearables will be a cultural issue going forward.
On the other hand, Apple has a better reputation when it comes to privacy — and pretty much everything, now that we think of it — than Meta, so it’ll be interesting to see the kind of response this gets.
A key difference is that Meta’s smart glasses explicitly record and take photos and videos of their surroundings; the camera-equipped AirPods, if the rumors are true, can’t be used to film yourself harassing women and strangers, as many “creators” on social media wearing the Meta spectacles have made a shtick out of doing. (As with Meta’s glasses, hardware hackers will probably be intensely interested in unlocking the camera to capture covert photos and video, though the AirPod ones reportedly will only “capture visual information in low resolution.”)
Those are all nuances worth considering, but it’s more than reasonable to feel uncomfortable about the casual proliferation of AI-powered cameras that scan your surroundings.
“I wasn’t too concerned with Meta glasses because they are pretty identifiably chunky glasses but this is really creeping me out how discreet this,” one user wrote.
Another joked: “You’re the Flock camera now.”
More on privacy: McDonald’s Has Hundreds of Pages of Intel on Its Repeat Customers, and You Can Get a Copy of Yours
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