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

Apple’s latest Watch pitch hit a nerve right away. The company said the devices can continuously listen to spoken words they detect and turn that into summaries of what’s happening around you. That is a tiny product tweak on paper and a huge privacy headache in real life.

The response was immediate. Privacy experts warned about legal trouble, especially in places where recording laws require both people to agree. That matters most in private settings, where a watch on someone’s wrist can become a recording device before anyone has time to think about it.

Plenty of people skipped the legal language and went straight for the gut reaction: creepy. Apple clearly knew that was coming and put up a page full of technical details meant to calm people down. According to the company, one feature — Liv … — is not what it sounds like, at least in Apple’s telling.

But this is the problem with always-on devices now. The more useful they become, the harder it is to tell where convenience ends and surveillance begins. And once a product can listen first and explain later, the burden is on everyone else to trust it.