AI wearables want to remember everything. What happens when we can’t forget?
A growing number of companies are pitching AI hardware products as a remedy for one of humanity’s oldest weaknesses: forgetfulness.
The latest such product comes from Amazon, whose Bee subsidiary introduced a $75 wristband called the Bee Frontier last month. The band, which looks a little like a screen-free fitness tracker, can record meetings and other conversations using two built-in microphones. Frontier owners can then access transcripts and conversation summaries on their phones or computers.
Amazon is also getting ready to sell a Bee phone accessory to keep track of your calls. The company’s pitch for these devices is that they will help you keep track of the many details that would otherwise fall by the wayside, all while safeguarding your privacy with encryption.
Amazon isn’t the only company looking to capture your work and family conversations. In September, Apple unveiled a new feature called Siri Recap for the latest Apple Watch models that can summarize conversations the watch listens in on. A new smart glasses brand called Vonder wants to keep track of your side of every conversation. And a number of work-centric AI recording devices promise to keep track of all your in-office conversations.
To be sure, these gadgets raise privacy concerns. But beyond the fear that any single conversation may be listened in on, there’s a bigger question to consider with the emergence of such devices: How will human interactions change if every word we utter may get sucked up by an AI-powered microphone, to be preserved for eternity?
LED lights alone don’t make devices privacy-friendly
To its credit, Amazon has been trying to address privacy concerns related to Bee products head-on. Audio captured by the devices is processed in real time and then immediately deleted. Transcripts and summaries are processed and stored in an encrypted private compute environment that even Amazon’s own employees can’t access. And any time a Bee device is used to capture a conversation, an LED turns on.
A number of other AI wearables, including Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses, also rely on LEDs to signal recording activity to bystanders. But privacy advocates argue that these lights are insufficient.
“That LED light might be known to some people to signify that a camera or a microphone is on and is being used, but not necessarily to every person,” says Electronic Privacy Information Center senior counsel Sara Geoghegan. “It’s small, and people might not notice it.”
Things can get especially dicey in states like California and Florida, which have two-party consent laws that make it illegal to record private conversations without the consent of other participants. Simply having a device signal that it is recording may not be enough to record others legally in those states. “I don’t think that a small LED light on someone’s glasses across from you is consent,” Geoghegan says.
What’s more, some Ray-Ban users have tampered with their LEDs to record others without their knowledge. This reportedly led Meta to remotely disable thousands of glasses.
By and large, companies rely on users of their devices to notify bystanders that they’re being recorded. That can be harder than it sounds, even for well-meaning owners. “Consent is perhaps impossible, if not much more difficult, to obtain from a crowd of people,” Geoghegan argues.
AI recorders could erode public spaces
Not everyone is as worried about the ability of these devices to record people without their knowledge. “I think consent is overvalued,” says Oxford University professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, who is instead more concerned about the broader impact of pervasive, AI-powered recording. “The ephemerality of public spaces has evaporated,” he warns.
People used to be able to go to a museum or a bar without worrying that anything and everything they said might get recorded and analyzed. “There used to be a sort of built-in forgetting in public spaces,” Mayer-Schönberger says.
If you made a bad joke or mispronounced a word, chances were that the people around you would forget about it soon after. AI may preserve that remark forever, leading him to wonder: What are the public spaces in which we can just be ourselves without having to worry about repercussions in the future?
Ubiquitous recording could ultimately cause people to retreat from public spaces, much as they frequently do in authoritarian societies. “In liberal democracies, engaging in public spaces is fundamental to the fabric of society,” Mayer-Schönberger says. “That retreat is actually what worries me.”
All of this is further complicated by the fact that some AI devices capture data even when they’re ostensibly not recording. Meta’s Ray-Bans, for instance, can be used to translate the remarks of your conversation partner. While doing so, their LED light stays off, as the devices don’t save any recordings to your phone’s camera roll. However, Meta’s servers may keep transcripts of translated conversations for up to a year if users don’t manually delete them.
The company’s new camera-free AI glasses don’t even have an LED light, making them virtually indistinguishable from regular glasses. “In the future, you will have to assume that everybody who wears glasses is actually recording something,” Mayer-Schönberger says.
AI gadgets require new social norms
AI device makers are aware of people’s privacy concerns, and a few have gone beyond LED lights to address them. HTC’s Vive Eagle smart glasses cease capture when a bystander says “stop recording,” and AI pendant maker Limitless even required audible consent from bystanders before recording their voices when it released its device in 2024. (The company has since been acquired by Meta, which hasn’t adopted this particular feature for its own AI gadgets.)
“Mechanisms and features that can obtain consent should be baked into the technology,” Geoghegan says. “Tech companies absolutely play a role in ensuring that the products they’re selling are safe.”
Mayer-Schönberger agrees that companies should play a more active role, but he also believes the public should have a say in how AI wearables are used. “They require careful negotiations within society of what is permissible and what is not permissible,” he says.
It’s a process he likens to earlier changes in how we behave in public: People used to yell at actors while watching a play, which seems unthinkable nowadays. Conversely, browsing your phone while spending time with others may have seemed strange not too long ago, but is perfectly acceptable to many people today.
“What is really important is that we start negotiating and we start trying things out,” Mayer-Schönberger says. Without public discourse, devices could remain unregulated until something bad happens, at which point regulators will inevitably overreach. “There is no quick fix, so it will be some relatively extreme regulatory theater,” he says. “Think about taking off shoes at airport security on steroids.”
