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Comment by ryanschaefer | Hacker News Reader

Had this thought during the presentation. How is the “rewind” feature legal? Don’t a lot of states have laws against making secret recordings?

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You've always been allowed to transcribe (ie, write) out a conversation. Recording is a different thing. A person can always claim, easily and believably, that the transcription is made up. It's just text.

Is that the main differentiator? Not the use of a microphone to create the transcription?

From a legal perspective you can't record something in many us states. Using the microphone, keeping the bits in memory while you turn it into text, probably doesn't meet any reasonable definition of "record".

Maybe this will be true legally (we wont really know until it is tested in court), but I think there's a huge difference in practice.

Siri Recap is an electronic record of a conversation that includes timestamps. Imagine for example that during a scheduled meeting with my boss, he threatens to fire me for not doing something illegal. I now have strong evidence that this was said (even if it cant be officially attributed to him) during the time I was in a meeting with him. Not saying this will hold up in court, but it certainly is more damning that having written notes (not to mention the fact that my boss probably wouldn't say this when I am taking written notes).

Yup, and maybe the law will need to evolve.

Fwiw, imo, you should assume everything you say (and write) is recorded going forward.

Making that feature illegal may backfire spectacularly across the whole IT sector. What Apple does is it inputs voice data into an AI program and that outputs some transformed output. If a court would rule that output in any way matches the input (to be classified as a "record") then the whole ethics principle of stealing other people's data and funneling it through AI to make it company's own, would be at risk.

I imagine no single spineless impotent modern court would risk a wrath of our new benevolent AI overlords calling them all criminals they really are.

It doesn't save a recording of someone speaking; it's 15 seconds of a transcription.

My understanding is it’s E2E transcribed dictation via PCC? Is that not the case?

There was an app that hit it’s peak during covid: Clubhouse.

Many powerful and interesting people were having powerful and presumably private conversations in rooms because they say people walk in and out and legally CH could not record without consent. But what they could do was “collect metadata”. Emotional and tonal analysis is metadata. So is time, date, location, username (each user had their own mic stream), email, etc. Transcription is also metadata.

Essentially the tech has left the laws in the dust as you could now reasonably and legally record enough metadata to accurately resynthesize a recording.

I guess it was already technically possible with phones though, or hidden tape recorders for something more old-school. Not sure on the legality.

Recordings, yes, but this is transcription.

They made it very clear that it doesn't record anything.

If it doesn’t record anything how does it make a transcript? I think some of these laws are strict enough such that no audio recording, even if it’s immediately discarded, is legal.

But of course, I am not a lawyer.

People generally don't think of keeping bits in memory for some short period of time as "recording".

Doesn't stop it being...recording, though.

There are similar exceptions. For instance, the copy of licensed content that your computer makes in RAM in order to play it is explicitly exempt from being treated as a copyright violation.

isnt that how the modern telephone system works? digitize your voice, encode, transmit, decode, convert to analog audio. with buffering or keeping bits in memory all along the way?

is a telephone call a recording?

and taken to it's extreme.... isn't the atmosphere secretly taking the vibrations in the air right outside out mouth and propagating them through a physical medium, making them available to anyone to capture?

An audio "recording" is data (digital, analog, grooves on vinyl, whatever) that allows later listening to the original audio.

What Apple is doing in Rewind is as legal as if you were to take a contemporary transcript of a conversation. That's not illegal.

It's legal even if you're a skilled shorthand transcriber and get every word. That's Rewind, if I've understood it correctly.

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