Post #2681520

2026-05-08 12:22 UTC

>The AirPods’ cameras “aren’t designed” to snap photos or video but instead can take in “visual information in low resolution” that users can query Siri about, like asking the AI assistant what they should cook with the ingredients they have in front of them, according to Gurman. They may also use the cameras to help with things like turn-by-turn directions. That doesn't sound "low-resolution" to me. Also, does anyone really trust them not to record the camera feed? It needs to be sent to the cloud for this thing to work, they're going to record it, and nothing is ever deleted. Just because the user isn't given the images, doesn't mean the video isnt' recorded.

Replies (3)

@panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2026-05-08 12:48

Not necessarily, you could compute embeddings on device, but that requires decent compute. And embeddings are reversible and don’t preserve privacy. It’s not meaningfully better than video.

Open ##2681554
@ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 2026-05-08 15:25

"Aren't designed to" is very different from "designed not to".

Open ##2681555
@ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 2026-05-09 00:15

I already assume that everything that goes into a cloud somewhere WILL be used for other purposes, at the very least as AI training material, and this will be no different. And the plan is for at least some (possibly all?) video to automatically be extracted to some kind of cloud storage, no matter how temporarily. From the article: > The AirPods will have a “small” LED light to indicate when “visual data is being fed into the cloud.” That's a hell of a non-answer to all the privacy concerns Apple already knows the public has. Since this entire article is itself just a manufacturer-friendly puff piece for pre-release promotion, the only conclusion I can draw is that Apple is willfully holding back the specifics on all of that. And again with the fucking notification light, like that's the solution to all privacy concerns. On AirPods a light can't possibly be more than a pinhole itself, just because of the size of the device, so that'll be even worse than Meta's joke of a notification light.

Open ##2681556