Rewind Pendant: a wearable that captures what you say and hear

> We offer features for you to ensure no one is recorded without their consent.

It says this 3 times without elaborating. How does this work?

A t-shirt with "I am recording you" in big letters

Only sold in states with one party consent? /s

Given the “insights into your life” feature, maybe it will refuse to record “new” voices without an explicit check? The implication of the marketing copy is that it understands both the words and the sentiment so it wouldn’t be that absurd to think it can also distinguish one person from another. I assume in the end Rewind’s expectation boils down to “trust us” which is not good enough for me but probably good enough for them to make money for people who don’t care.

I had the same thought. As far as I can tell, they are leaning on the ability to pause recording at any time, meaning that in all-party consent states, it's up to the user to disclose that they are employing a recording device. That seemingly defeats the point of the device in many situations where the default state should be off. I would most benefit from something like this in public situations where I'm meeting a lot of people, but it'd be impractical to use it that way where I live.

I want one that has a print of the "On Air" signs seen in studios.

I honestly think that something like that needs to happen to things like the Meta RayBan glasses that do live streaming. Instead of the eyeballs that Apple's device is using, it should have a "Recording In Progress" or "On Air" across the lenses. Just because I'm in public and prone to be captured in someone's image capture doesn't mean that I have to be part of their money making venture.

They're probably just piping it into ChatGPT with the instruction "Rephrase the following sentence:".

That would be disappointing. The way I've always figured this would work is to just record the wearer using voice recognition and filter out everyone else unless some consent phrase is heard.

IR blasting clothing is still legal to wear!

That would be the ideal way, but from the use cases on the site it doesn't seem to be the intended use.

My prediction is typical move fast break things tech bro culture. Release a product to everyone that is illegal in most states, wait for people to get hurt by it and care enough to complain, withdraw the product from the problem areas.

The fact they're so vague on who is recorded means they don't actually care, or at best don't have a solution yet to the problem.

Does notification equal consent, legally?

Grey area depends on if you have the option to deny I think.

i've been looking at the idea of ball cap with surface mount LEDs under the bill of the cap, but i'm not much of a cap wearer any more. i then thought if they can fit cameras into sunglasses, why not do the Orbital thing with bright LEDs attached to my sunnies? then, the evil grin comes out and starts thinking more sinister with lasers to not just ruin the shot, but the sensor itself. then i realize, i've got work to do, and forget the whole thing

Like the anti-paparazzi clothes that regularly pop up in crystal clear photos?

Exactly. Their desktop app uses whisper.cpp for handling transcriptions, then stores the output in a SQLite database. Summarization is handled by piping the transcript into GPT-4…

(co-founder & CEO of Rewind here)

I'd really love to share more but our competitors will try to imitate it and I want to build as large of a lead as I can before we unveil it.

I'll just say: it is fundamental to the product experience, not a bolt on.

Do you have to say it again every 5 minutes though?

My guess is that they mask out the audio of other speakers, and only give you the transcription.

I am doubtful that that would work well in practice though.

>> We offer features for you to ensure no one is recorded without their consent.

> it is fundamental to the product experience

Without speaking too much to the underlying implementation, could you at least:

Clarify if "fundamental to the product experience" and "ensure no one is recorded without their consent" means the control loop is able to sense a non-consenting speaker and stop recording?

Clarify if "recorded without their consent" means never sending recordings off-device? Or does it just mean omitting the record from user facing long-term storage?

Clarify whether consent is opt-in or opt-out?

Clarify whether consent is actually consent, or the effective equivalent of supplying the user a "resume recording" button?

If you have the option to deny without negative consequences. "They could always jump off the plane."

If you mean the retroreflective stuff, that's because it requires a bright flash to work. Modern digital cameras now are generally good enough to not require flash for a good picture, even in low-light conditions, so paparazzi don't use them near as often.

Clothing or accessories that shine IR are a completely different functionality and while they could be stopped by paparazzi buying better IR filters, that requires an additional cost on top of the camera

FWIW, I’m an existing customer (of the app) and this has significantly damaged my perception of Rewind as a company. You should stop talking about it until you have a credible answer to this question.

about 10 years ago I spoke with an officer who knew the law for our 'one party consent (aware) state' and was told then that you can legally record others' voices with zero person consent if it was 'posted or announced'

- However the way the law is written, it's vague enough that the 'posting or announcing' you need to give notice if recording others not in your conversation could be:

simply having 'we're recording' printed and posted on the door of a club would be legal, (nothing saying how large of print, or if it was surrounded by 100 other printed things)

and so would someone shouting 'hey we're recording' in a bar .

- that's the way the law was technically written, and though we know that yelling 'we're recording' would not be heard or even register to those who did hear the statement, that and what it would mean and most would miss the printed notice on door or forget it - it would technically be legal.

(no need to do both, either would satisfy law as written)

Not sure if the laws on this have been updated since then, and pretty sure it varies state by state.

I am not a lawyer, and am not referencing any case law here.

Thanks for the feedback! Do you think this qualifies as a credible answer? If not, what more can we offer to rebuild your trust in us?

https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1709605449253974352

Hello,

Do you sell it to Portugal?

Thanks in avance.

Hugo