Apple is reportedly dipping its toe into recording and AI-summarizing your repair and tech support conversations with its employees at the Genius Bar.
This new pilot program called “Live Notes” is being pitched as a time-saving tool for the store employees themselves, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, and is still only in a limited number of stores. The recording of the conversation, Gurman explains, is auto-transcribed and summarized, and then stored in the “record of the repair session” on the Genius Bar employee’s work iPad.
But Gurman writes that the tool has “sparked concern” among Apple Store workers, since, obviously, something almost exactly like this could be used for monitoring and evaluating employees.
But for now, Apple apparently claims the audio recordings aren’t saved, that the program is opt-in for both parties—the employee and the customer—and that managers don’t get to view the transcripts.
Wall Street loves tools like this—and not just big Apple investors. JPMorgan recently rolled out a monitoring tool that sounds similarly Orwellian, but the company similarly claims it’s just a helper for employees. The digital monitoring system uses video call data, meeting schedules, and—perhaps scariest of all—keystroke data, to cobble together a report that tells junior banker whether their actual output matches their reported output. But the company says it’s using it to evaluate performance from above, and claims “like the weekly screen time summaries on a smartphone, this tool is about awareness — not enforcement.”
Self-monitoring purely for the convenience of employees may strain plausibility, but for what it’s worth, outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke out in 2018 in support of European-style privacy regulations, and said privacy was a “fundamental human right.” Nonetheless, in 2019, in a scandal that eventually resulted in a class action settlement, Apple eavesdropped on Siri recordings in order to rate them. Apple admitted the practice was problematic shortly after it was exposed, saying “we realize we haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologize.”
Gurman calls Live Notes an early test, and says that’s part of what makes employees nervous, since invasive monitoring is increasingly becoming bedrock reality in the tech biz.
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