My friend and long-ago editor Glenn Fleishman has a good column this week at Six Colors on Live Listen.
In his piece, he says Apple is absolutely not using the longstanding accessibility feature to spy on people.
“Because we live in an age of conspiracy, some bozos have decided that an innocuous, well-documented feature that’s existed since 2020 (with iOS 14.3/iPadOS 14.3) somehow translates to ‘all the iPhones and iPads with this update, both personal and operational, are by default listening in on all conversations around them, transcribing them, and sending those transcriptions up to Apple for advertising purposes’ to quote from misinformation across two posts on Bluesky,” Fleishman wrote on Monday. “The impetus appears to be a setting in iOS and iPadOS at Settings: Accessibility: Audio & Video: Live Listen, called Remote Control. It would have first appeared in iOS 26/iPadOS 26, and the current panic alleges it was turned on by default in the 27 updates.”
I’ve seen a few people push this tinfoil-hat theory on X, and it’s bullshit. As I quipped on Mastodon today, Fleishman does well to explain the situation, as well as what Live Listen purports to do—but the fundamental reason for this “outrage” online is because the majority of people have absolutely zero fucking clue as to what accessibility features do or how they work. While the ignorance is understandable to an extent—it’s unreasonable to expect the mainstream to be accessibility aesthetes—these particular foul cries are pure disinformation campaigns meant to spike one’s engagement on social media. It’s maddening because not only are the people flat-out wrong, but because it makes a bonafide, genuinely good accessibility feature in Live Listen appear far more sinister than it should. Ultimately, such messaging harms the disability community because it makes it seem Apple insidiously dropped literal spyware amongst the most altruistic functions in iOS, thus diluting its raison d’être. Never mind the fact that the company would never in a million years risk its trillion-dollar reputation on such a shady practice. It’d be a lose-lose situation.
At a macro level, Fleishman’s column dovetails into the problems the mainstream tech media still fails to reckon with regarding putting more resources into disability reporting. As I said, Fleishman does a great job here—but it feels isolated. I’m reminded of this story at The Verge from nine years ago (for which I was interviewed) about how tech journalism is woefully inadequate at covering accessibility. I can’t help but think if coverage were robust—ahem, AI—then maybe the rise in awareness would beget a rise in education, so then you would see less asinine posts online because something like Live Listen would have been properly documented for the record. (My one really big scoop in almost 14 years as a journalist was when I reported for TechCrunch in 2018 Live Listen would arrive for AirPods in iOS 12.)
