The latest Apple Watch models have some new features: they can listen to the sounds around you all day, transcribe snippets of conversation on demand, and write up summaries of everything they heard.

This kind of ambient, always-on surveillance raises privacy concerns, which Apple addresses well. The company says audio is never “recorded” or stored, that nothing is attributed to any speaker, and all content is encrypted so even Apple cannot read it.

I have no reason to doubt any of that. But my reaction to these features is still clear: ick.

I’m not the only one who feels that way, and the ick deserves to be taken seriously. Let me explain why.

The conversation belongs to the room

The new features may run into problems with privacy laws, particularly those that require consent from people being recorded, but also with unspoken social conventions about speech.

When we talk with other people, we have some expectations about what happens to our words. Our comfort comes from what information scientist Helen Nissenbaum calls contextual integrity: the expectation that information moves around according to the norms of the setting in which it is shared.

What you say across a café table, in a bathroom, at a dinner party, at a town hall meeting or during a television broadcast is said for the people present and for the purposes apparent in that moment. Until now, our ambient conversations were not said for a auto-magical-summariser to fold into........

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