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Hey!

Last week, we talked about AI wearables and privacy. Let’s continue that conversation.

Amazon sells an AI personal assistant you can wear on your wrist, but to do its job, it listens to all your conversations. Meta sells Ray-Ban smart glasses with AI that records what you see and hear.

Wearable AI is impressive, but it raises serious privacy concerns for consumers.

The problem is, you don't even have to own a device for your privacy to be violated.

Someone else's device could listen to your conversations or record you without consent. And Big Tech can't afford to ignore this.

No company has solved that problem. However, Apple, Qualcomm, and Meta are starting with data from consumers who do wear these devices.

Here’s what’s happening.

Whenever you submit something online, save a file, or even text a friend, companies encrypt your data in order to process it and store it in the cloud for “safe” keeping.

But with AI, the process is different.

AI can’t process your data if it’s encrypted. So to use it, your data needs to be decrypted, read, processed, and sent to other AI systems. All that has to happen before the AI can respond to you.

That means AI data doesn’t have the same built-in protections as the regular data used by traditional technology.

Apple’s trying to solve that with something they call Private Cloud Compute.

Basically, Private Cloud Compute is designed to “lock down systems,” restricting access to your data while servers process it. Even Apple's own administrators can't access it.

Right now, Apple hasn’t figured out how to stop someone else’s wearable from recording you, but it’s trying to give you more confidence that whatever is recorded won’t be accessible. Not even to Apple.

Instead of asking you to trust that Apple won’t break their privacy policy, Apple’s building technology that makes promises hard to break in the first place.

Qualcomm designs a semiconductor chip so powerful that your AI data never needs to be sent to a cloud for processing. It’ll run right on your phone, smart glasses, or other wearable AI devices.

It's called Snapdragon, but it’s known as on-device AI.

If you ask an Amazon Bee bracelet or Meta Smart Glasses to summarize a conversation, less personal information would need to travel across the internet for processing.

Basically, they’re trying to make sure your data never needs to be shared in the first place.

But just because your data doesn’t reach the cloud doesn't mean the person wearing the device can’t save or share it. That’s a completely different problem.

Qualcomm doesn’t decide who can save and access data on a device. Device manufacturers do.

So while one privacy problem is solved, another is left unresolved.

For Meta, the AI smart-glasses features everyone loves need to be sent to the cloud.

The glasses take photos, video, and audio of the world around you, and the most useful AI features require powerful cloud servers to process the data.

So Meta’s approach to protect your privacy is similar to Apple’s, and they announced something called Private Processing. The technology is designed to restrict access to your data while AI uses it.

Right now, it’s Meta's best attempt to make smart glasses more trustworthy without sacrificing the AI features everyone wants.

All three approaches have a major limitation for people who don’t own the devices: the approaches only protect data after it's already collected. That isn't the same as getting permission to collect it in the first place.

It may be a challenge the industry still needs to resolve.

Privacy could determine how far AI wearables go in the mainstream market.

Companies that collect personal information have legal liability. If they violate privacy laws, they could face lawsuits and regulatory trouble.

Apple, Qualcomm, and Meta are trying to reduce some of the risk, but none of the solutions make it legal to record someone without consent.

For that reason, I haven't personally invested in wearable AI. There’s more to explore, and I’m patient, watching to see how it all unfolds.

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