> Secure Exclaves. The A18 chip inside HomeView contains Secure Exclaves that process the camera and microphone feeds in a secure compartment that cannot be accessed by the operating system or by Apple. This enables HomeView to recognize the face and voice of each user without exposing the audio and visual data used for recognition to the operating system.
I feel like we’re already surrounded by devices that do this without any security whatsoever (TVs for example). So, it’s nice to see one implementation try to do it safely. Though, I do agree that normalizing overt recording could embolden the rest.
TVs died. Not fully, but they went from the ubiquity of smartphones to the “oh yeah I’ve got one lying around” of VR. The shit they’ve been up to since is a response to trying to recover a much bigger industry’s profits by juicing a remainder that they’ve realized is so inert they’ll let you do anything to them. I really hope the resemblance to mainstream tech is minimal.
Well, the devices were doing it in the most hidden way possible. This is plain in the open and that's how that window is moved. And yes, I absolutely believe that the overt recording is the actual moment where they expect us to actually get used to it.
Also, the assistants are not recording, they're analyzing sound wave for the trigger word. This isn't recording, it's been explained countless times already.
This whole conversation is about taking it to next level.
I do see your point, but what the assistants are doing is recording. It's only a second or two, on-device, and not stored, but it is already a recording. Apple is just changing the duration and retention.
I think as soon as the original capability launched the game was over. People don't understand technical distinctions like that and they've already accepted it.
If there's nothing left and it's deleted, then it's not recorded.
I am talking about the recording that lasts. Recording people's voice without their consent, on your behalf, and transcribing the text for your later use. It's not volatile 2s analyzed by the DSP, it's an actual record of conversation.
This is not the same recording.
But yes, I see your point, too, maybe back then we got used to it at an even less intrusive level. So it progresses, slowly, but surely, like a frog in a pot.
The fuck are you talking about? Doing it safely is extremely easy and already solved: have the user be root.
This is about remote control. People who think Apple/Google/Microsoft will just pass on the reigns of that remote control are dangerously naïve.
Apple has locked down whole classes of third-party utilities for its mobile system and Google is copying them as we speak. We are slowing progress at great cost by letting them lock-in and rent seek.
There's an argument to be made that progress on desktop personal computers has been faster because hackers (in the good sense) can hack around and invent new stuff in ways you really cannot on mobile/tablet locked-down hardware and software.
The commenter may have sounded unhinged but the thesis is sound.
Apple themselves keep assuming that they themselves can be unquestionably trusted. The same company that keeps inventing ever more elaborate ways to forcibly insert itself between users and developers to collect rent even when explicitly required by regulators to open up its devices to allow anyone to freely install anything.
Apple’s agreement is that if you trust Apple, their stuff is the best in the business - if Apple is not a weak link, it’s real hard to argue with the design, and the ease of use and UX for the level of security you get is unequal anywhere else. Apple’s side of the bargain is you pay them money, and lots of it.
If you don’t trust Apple, you’re on your own - you can probably recreate all this on a FOSS stack, but you’re gonna have to do it repeatedly for everything, and you’re on the hook for explaining it to everyone you know so they can use it, too. It’s not that you _can’t_ do it yourself, it’s just a whole lot harder than if you accept the bargain and trust Apple.
Whether or not you want to do that is up to you, but I don’t think anyone’s in the dark on what the bargain is.
> you can probably recreate all this on a FOSS stack, but you’re gonna have to do it repeatedly for everything
I’m honestly surprised in the age of vibe-coding we haven’t seen someone try to build out a direct “open walled garden”.
AI could solve the basic coverage on every operating system and screen shape, while the various p2p technologies have gotten really good and when combined with mDNS and maybe an encrypted byo-cloud-storage (eg drive, Dropbox, etc APIs) for async data synching. The nerd side is build a data sync layer, then a variety of apps and products can be built on top of it.
It doesn’t necessarily need to work as well as Apple, nor as rich features, it just needs to support enough devices well enough to allow heterogeneous-platform households or friends to share what they need.
Yeah, so this is also why there’s a raft of stuff Apple will never support integrations with. They’ll bill it under security, and they’re not entirely wrong, but it’s also a threat to their core value prop, so you’ll never get open source iMessage, for example.
Are you kidding me? The absolutely vile vitriol that the members of the open source/modding/FOSS/self-hosting communities have been spitting out for actual years now, against ai and against vibe coding and against the people who use either has been so tremendously effective. And you want to know why someone hasn't used ai to gift you an entire ecosystem? What an incredibly out of touch statement to have to read on this site, where so much of the vitriol lives even today.
That’s part of the agreement too. Ternus or next guy/gal messes up one huge thing in any significant way, trust is burned and they’re just another Google.
(They are on watchlist for Apple Maps & other ads…)
And the reason to trust Apple is because they recognize this - they’re not under any illusion about why their products command a premium, and so the security and privacy angle is (or should be) one of the sacred cows inside Apple.
And you’re absolutely right - as soon as they break the value proposition, the value of their package and the price people are willing to pay for it drops in half and they’ve all the sudden gotta compete with Google and Samsung and Huaiwei and the rest of that jungle, and that market sucks.
I understand the argument that the lesser of two bad options is the better one.
The massive issue in all of this is digital identity.
Everyone is a citizen of a private corporation without any rights or access points to their digital identity.
Humans rely on our digital identity (email accounts, iCloud, google, etc) for nearly everything.
In many ways, it's like the equivalent of using our license or other ID in physical spaces.
Except, humans are relying on digital identities provided as digital citizens of corporations (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc), whereby they do no have teh same recourse that official access points of data do.
If at any given time, the majority of the identity providers are generally or ultimately not on the side of the identity holders (human) wrt to their inalienable rights.
There's no easy answer for this. Convenience has been used as a massive tradeoff for security for 10-15 years to the point that most people don't know better, or that there were and can be better options.
Downplaying the fact that the single change of a few sentences could change for worse the promises any corporation makes (it's not entitled to serve the user's needs first, after all).
Security and Privacy in Apple certainly seem to be better, but are not the best they could be.
Privacy and security, especially where it comes to protecting people from increasing threats online including AI bots, is not going to come from corporations alone, they haven't been able to build or roll them out while they learn at the expense of people.
There's no answer being pointed to, only that Apple being the only vendor with some promises isn't very good at all.
More than one. The Apple Wallet fiasco, apple maps thing, etc have tested customer perception, before. Even some utter bullshit ones like the battery thing… they still sound like trust violations to dummies.
Some resilience there for sure, sometimes the products were just plain early... Apple Maps comes to mind when it first came out, it took a while for it to become more.. complete.
The new ability to add one's own passes to Apple Wallet is nice though. Long overdue.
(I'm not saying this is exclusively Apple's fault: the lack of Nest interop is Google's fault, but Apple isn't making it easy for third-parties to build Apple-Google bridges either)
I find it frustrating that I can’t drive HomeKit externally. I have a large home ecosystem, something in the order of 100 devices, from lights to outlets to motion sensors to security and locks to the garage door, some native and some bridged via HomeBridge. I have a bunch of scenes and automations.
But I have, for example, a couple of Brilliant smart wall panels (one gang sized little panels with lighting and other controls) that I have to duplicate because despite the Brilliant being able to expose devices as a bridge to HomeKit I can’t say “Run this Scene” because Apple doesn’t allow external integrations to do so.
That's a Nest issue, not an apple one. Google neutered their own API as of 2019, then did even more shenanigans after that. It's a google product, assume it will be killed the moment whoever is actively working it sees a new shiny.
You're in the dark yourself already, as you frame the bargain in a simplistic way. You imply, this was just about having "nice stuff" and the lack of short-term alternatives was imposing merely a life-style choice upon you.
The systemic "lack of alternatives" is steering you, you confuse "not knowing alternatives" with the actual absence of alternatives and ignore possible further implications entirely.
The pattern is systemic capture, keeping you sedated about it is part of the scheme.
I’d argue this why security research versions of various devices are made and distributed to researchers. There was a big thing with private cloud compute and iPhone, I can see the same thing happening for exclaves
The issue seems like every other company is speed racing into data capture (and perhaps surveillance). There is obviously some end user advantages to all that data and continuos listening of signals, which other companies leverage as "features" rather than their entire business model.
So if everyone else has a feature that lets you use your voice all the time as an input device, you are seen behind the times if you don't offer it. But at the same time if you want to offer protection for that feature, not being able to access it outside the device is the only acceptable answer.
Consumers who are more discerning, privacy conscious and technologically literate would be best. But without that being an option, having one major company still even pretend to care about privacy is at least refreshing
The issue with this particular Watch is they talk so much about the privacy of the recording from device's owner perspective, while they completely disregard the aspect of consensuality of third parties who are also being recorded.
This is the same as with the Meta glasses and that's where I believe said Overton window is being expanded to. I am not one for conspiracy theories but it's not hard to notice the sudden appearance of these devices and their "this is cool" and the implied "what is even your problem" gaslighting advertising.
> I am not one for conspiracy theories but it's not hard to notice the sudden appearance of these devices
I think sadly there is a much sadder and boring explanation. Google already tried Google Glass 12? years ago
its not sudden, its just the tech has matured enough. And Google and Fb are ad companies, their market is telling companies "we know everything about your customers, pay us so we can give it to you". For them to grow the arms race of privacy invading information collection is inevitable. But you cant keep asking more of consumers without giving them something in return, so they wrap the data collection in "features", which they then tell everyone you are falling behind if you do not have them.
So if you are not into data collection you either fall behind in feature parity or you find a way to have the minimum required info in terms of spillage. And Apple seems to fall on the second one
(Whether having gigantic corporations whose entire business model is selling advertiser information that users do not know was collected should be allowed to operate, and have hardware businesses, an dpolice connections and defense contracts is perhaps a much less interesting but easier moral question where the answer seems like an easy NO)
Then they'll share the information with the government under the guise of "think of the children" or "stopping racism". Anyone against the conversation collection will be pro child abuse, or in support of antisemitism.
I am afraid that this is indeed being orchestrated. Apple's ad explaining why you'd want that recording working on your Watch was really pulling some very odd use cases, like the restaurant specials. Which got me thinking they had a product first and then needed to justify its existence....
And again you have to take their word for it because it's proprietary.
And even if it did work as expected, given the track record of 3 lettres agences, the chance they didn't gag order their way into a back door for this one is also very low.
I find it naïve that after what we learned for the last 20 years people still believe this PR.
I mean it's proprietary, but we understand the architecture well enough and have high degree of trust for a reason. Trusted execution environments have been around for years with really good results from a security and privacy perspective. Apple enclaves have been around over a decade and exclave 2 years now [1]. If security researchers find that backdoors exists and not just an exploit, it's in Apple's best interest to fix it based on bad PR alone.
AWS enclaves [2] have been around for a few years now with decent research on the topic and they are highly secure from personal experience and pentesting [3]. The idea at least is similar for exclaves, instead of a separate VM or a completely detached coprocessor chip, Exclaves create isolated resources on the main system-on-chip.
What bad PR? When it was released that Apple let the gov suck all the user data throught the PRISM programme, as there any drawback?
No. Most People just shrugged. Gag order, they were forced, not their fault.
Why would you even remotely believe that they are not under a similar situation with the current admin? It's just ridiculously naïve.
In fact, with the recent ledger scandal we know you can bypass good hardware security in clever ways if you are an external actor.
But in this case the actor is just Apple, they can do whatever they want. And Tim Cook offered a gold bribe to trump in public, so we know for a fact they are under pressure.
We know Apple have cheated in the past (the home button scandal). We know they have a lied about privacy (turned out 3rd party contractors had access to your siri conversation).
Your position is just not credible in 2026. It's the xkcd wrench vs encryption type of argument, and it ignores two decades of history.
Reading such argument on HN tells me Snowden did throw away his life for nothing, damn.
I'm assuming good faith for you, please do so for me when it comes to credibility. I don't think the supporting references and my argument that I think your position is too skeptical warrants reducing it to XKCD.
> What bad PR?
It literally changed Apple's marketing and privacy features for years to come [1] and at the next request of the FBI forced them to choose privacy and security as something the would like to be known for and incorporate into their products long term. [2] Snowden made a note how effective Apple's encryption had become in 2016. [3]
> Why would you even remotely believe that they are not under a similar situation with the current admin? It's just ridiculously naïve.
Multiple aspects of the larger program was done without the knowledge of the tech companies, PRISM was no where near the level of pervasiveness as Upstream. [3]. They inserted a man in the middle on the fiber lines leaving data centers to copy traffic, functionally making backdoors unnecessary.
> 3rd party contractors had access to your siri conversation
I'm glad that one was leaked, it's something that a lot of us thought was happening with many voice assistants, and it shows just why sensitive quality control should not be outsourced.
> Your position is just not credible in 2026 . . . ignores two decades of history. . . Reading such argument on HN tells me Snowden did throw away his life for nothing, damn.
Same goes to you, you ignored all improvements related to this discourse over that time. I'm highly skeptical of many corporations, including Apple, but my goals are to understand the whole picture and direction. Overall Apple has been up and down in terms of security and privacy commitments, but significantly better compared to companies such as Google, Huawei, and Meta.
Yes? It's just a matter of time before governments figure out they can simply use AI to backdoor designs and insert themselves anywhere in the supply chain. If it isn't happening yet, it soon will be ...
if anyone has read the trusting trust paper, one will know you can theoretically create code where vulnerabilities are hidden in plain sight. But that would mean its designed and reviewed by people who don't understand it in the first place.
Some of us are dyslexic (and given that it's commonly comorbid with ADHD and autism, it's pretty prevalent on HN). You don't have to be a dick about it.
For those following along, the Secure Enclave is a separate core that runs most of the security stuff (including hardware like the fingerprint scanner), and Secure Exclaves are essentially virtual machines on the main AP cores used as a security boundary for specific tasks, kind of like Qubes does.
without the context of your disability or disorder, if you confidently spout nonsense, then from an outside perspective, you are the problem. externally, i have no knowledge into your disabilities or disorders, or even if you're lying for sympathy (to be clear, i do not think you are lying). however, i will not accept you making it my problem that, when you confidently spout nonsense and lies, you were corrected
maybe, in the future, you will be less willing to publicly make statements confidently chastising people and products for things they are not doing
feel free to have the last word, but i don't see any value to continuing this conversation
My issue wasn't the correction, it was you being a dick about it. Or did you legitimately think that I wasn't aware of of the fact that different words mean different things?
On top of all of that, the neural network for FaceID currently runs in the secure enclave, and directly controls the fingerprint reader hardware, so it wasn't exactly a leap to think they moved the hardware pathway for the camera there too. My admonishment for doing too much in the secure enclave exists for the current state of the world.
So Apple pinky-promises they will record everything you do at home and they won't use it? In any way? I find this really hard to believe. Apple is into ads now, so would you let Google/Meta see and listen inside your home all day? Nope.
So what was the furore about when that Ring/Amazon superbowl ad happened. They have to promise and they should be able to be held liable if that promise is not kept.
> Obviously depends on actual implementation details
So Apple can ship whatever update they want, doing whatever with no oversight or independent review. No thanks - you folks are forgetting the US a surveillance state.
A device with no physical switch for it's microphone and cameras worries me and it's just not worth whatever minor convenience this adds.
> you folks are forgetting the US a surveillance state
This is exactly why Apple emphasizes they lack the ability (keys) to decrypt your data stored on iCloud or in transit. US courts will demand it, and this way Apple can say it literally is unable to comply no matter what the court orders. You can certainly choose not to believe them, but at least they are making the legal argument in actual court cases. I don’t see the other big tech companies doing that.
You really need to read those terms of service - what you're saying is true _only_if you enable "advanced data protection" which nobody does because almost nothing works and it's opt-in, so people don't really know about it.
Except if a device has a microphone and a network interface, it has the technical capability of sharing those recordings. The only realistic way to guarantee this sort of thing is to reverse engineer the entire chain between the two and then never install any software updates.
> The only realistic way to guarantee this sort of thing is to reverse engineer the entire chain between the two and then never install any software updates.
Reverse engineer the hardware and not change it, that's the whole point, it's not in the software, only queries after the keyword are passed forward (if I'm understanding correctly, gee I don't even like apple much, things I choose to spend my time on..)
They've published several whitepapers and technical documentation on how the secure enclave works and it's been poked at by security researchers for years.
They have been. Through years of use, independent auditing, industry and government certification processes, and their Apple Security Research program.
This is a brand new product. Basically nothing what you wrote applies to it. Also, I cannot find any public independent audit result for this specific product. Heck, I couldn't find even a single one about any Apple products, what I found all of them said that they're not verification at all, and of course Apple never published anything related to these.
Let's please dispense with the "trust me bro" paranoia takes. Link to something that demonstrates your point or you're just making baseless accusations that discourage people from trusting actual privacy and security research.
