The Chaser Report - You Are Being Apple Watched

Episode Date: September 13, 2026

As well as a folding phone, Apple has announced that your watch will now listen to everything you say. Meanwhile, the television is also listening to you, and making some rather off-putting content recommendations. At this point, it's a shock that Charles and Dom aren't eavesdropping on your conversations. ---Listen AD-FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, it's not every day that a company manages to produce a feature which is both creepy and almost useless. So kudos to Apple for adding a very strange new feature to the new Apple Watchers, which we'll talk about shortly. As part of a general conversation about creepy surveillance. in things. LG as well.

Congratulations. LG, of course, standing for life's good. See, I have a feeling that, because I told you I wanted to talk about LG. Yes. Because, you know, that's what the listeners want. It's really lucky Gold Star, but now it's life's good. But, Dom, I don't think you realize, I just need legal advice about LG. I need legal advice about LG.

Yeah, yeah. It's not anything to do with surveillance. Well, let's just deal with, we'll deal with all three things. We'll deal with legal advice. Apple's strange new feature And then the sort of fairly related Disconcerting news That if you have an LG smart TV

Do you have an LG smart TV? Yes, and I want to sue them Do you like your conversations being recorded And I didn't know that that was happening But is it I assume that's why we're recording this in an outdoor space We're actually in a garden Away from my LG TV

And my LG smart TV We've both got them Fuck That's probably got the whole of the podcast on there This is like an... Does this count as an ad to LG? Probably. The other thing you might want to do,

just probably go into the ads, is just skip back in your podcast app. Oh, yeah. 15 seconds. And think about how long that is. It's 15 seconds. But think about how much speech is covered in 15 seconds, because that's going to be relevant

when we talk about apples. Creepy yet useless new feature. Oh, wow. After these ads, which will be probably longer. Let's be honest in 15 seconds. So where should we start? Should we start with your dilemma? No, no.

No, no, let's do the Apple Watch. Apple Watch series 12. Which I have wonderfully gotten rid of out of my life. You don't have Apple Watch anymore. I used to have an Apple Watch about two years ago I gave it up. And I was literally just talking this afternoon about how blissful my life is now that I don't have an Apple Watch. Yeah, now that it's not monitoring what you do. Yeah.

Well, for those who might want to get the new Series 12 or Ultra 4 Apple Watchers, the ones that we just announced in the past week, along with the iPhone duo. We already did a whole episode on. We thought it was called the iPhone Fold, but basically we were right about everything. My biggest disappointment with the Apple Watch is that it doesn't have two screens. Couldn't that be amazing? They should have made it so that you can fold it open. Yeah, wouldn't it be great if you could flip open?

Huge missed opportunity. The screen of the Apple Watch and sort of watch a video. It's now the size of two Apple Watchers. Yeah. Now, three inches in diameter. All right, so stick out. That's going to come next year. That'll be next year.

So they've got a thing called live rewind, Charles. And in the video... Live rewind. If Lockland could be... That sounds like a Hollywood movie about a dystopian future where you can rewind 15 seconds. I met a huge fell part. But don't worry.

I'll press live. We're right. It's kind of like that. So in the ad, like in the big presentation, yeah, they do, which Lockland can cut a bit of if he wants to into here. Just double-pressed a digital crown. And Live Rewind transcribes what was just said. The next audio intelligence feature will help you remember key moments from daily conversations

so you can be more present and engaged. Introducing Siri Recap. It uses ambient listening to take high-level notes of your conversations. They had a situation where a waiter comes over to your table and tells you what the specials of the day are. Lovely. But you're not paying attention because you're probably too busy playing with your iPhone duo. I don't know why you're not playing it.

But you want to know. No, because you've got about 15 trillion notifications on your Apple watch in the last 15 seconds. It's super annoying. Yes. And most of them in your episodes of the chat. Oh, complete your ring. Yeah. So then the waiter walks away and you go, oh, no, what are the specials of the day?

Just before you go, sorry, I know that you're in the middle of an anecdote, but I just wanted to inform you that there's an opportunity to tether with your iPhone if you want to. Oh, I see. Yeah. I see what you're doing. It's very helpful. Oh, by the way, you've got three unread messages from three years ago. You know what the most annoying one is Substack? Do you know how often people update Substack?

Oh, my God. Anyway. So the point is, if you want to know what the specials were, have I got good news for you? Because your Apple Watch was listening to the conversation, and it's recorded the conversation, and you can press a button and look at a transcript of what was said in the past 15 seconds. So it's continuously transcribing your life.

continually records and transcribes your life. How does the battery last? Well, supposedly it can do this all day. That's amazing. So you could literally just transcribe your entire day. So this is... Look, I know you're going to say, oh, there's privacy concerns. That is awesome.

Well, there have been for a very long time. Yeah, a little... Hang on, just... Before I get to that... So it does... So you can rewind the past 15 seconds and it gives you the transcript. Right, yeah. The other thing that it does, at the end of the day,

there's a thing called Siri Recap and it will give you titles, summaries, key points from conversations. And you know what it'll say to you. It'll say, that's a great question. Can I look up some web results for you? That's right.

So this is predicated on the other than that. Syria works better. How was my day, Siri? Oh, I don't know. Let me look up Google. Yeah. So in theory, this works. Who knows?

As you say, Siri's been pretty mediocre. But it does this. And then the other, other thing that it does. But why? Why would you want that? Is it so that you can like recap all the faux pas you've made across the day? So you can obsessively go back and feel awful about all the times you said something completely inappropriate. That awkward interaction that you had with the waiter, that terrible faux par you made about your friend's partner being a bit chubby? So this is the thing that's strangest to me is that obviously there's a privacy issue. Now, Apple's argument for the 15 second

thing is, well, it's only keeping the recording locally on the device. It's transcribing it so you can't go back and use the audio. It's basically like your mind. Yes, that's right. It's as private as your mind. It's not, except that it exists on the web. I mean, I still think it's possible that it violates the Surveillance Devices Act. But anyway, we'll see about that.

But the thing that's so weird about it is that 15 seconds isn't very long. And that's why I said people should just get back. Because if there's some crucial information, like are we all goldfishers that But we need to know as a crucial information that was mentioned earlier, but in the past 15 seconds, it's not long at all. But Dom, what you don't realize is that was the Apple Watch for goldfishers. Yeah, I suppose. Because presumably in any conversation, you can just say rather having to play with you watching,

then stop the conversation. Sorry, let me just look at a recap on my watch. Yeah, you go, excuse me, way, what was that last thing you just said? Sorry, Charles, can you explain that I wasn't fully paying attention to your fascinating theory? Just tell me again. That's just we do that normally. So the use case is very strange. It's like it's the Elon Musk's of this world, isn't it, that it's catering to.

It's the people who have no social radar so they don't know how to ask people, you know, can you just go back a bit? But can you imagine them? And they don't feel like they should be wrong ever. Like I think it's also people who don't want to ever be caught out doing anything human. But we're having a conversation now in which you're making eye contact and we're actually having a conversation. you know, being like human beings. For me to use that feature, I'd have to stop talking to you, stop looking at you, and peer at my watch and sort of fiddly press its buttons for a little while.

Like, it probably would take more than 15 seconds to do that. So I don't really get the point of this feature. And this is the larger point about AI, right, which is that there's a whole lot of use cases that people are coming up with. None of which actually are a good use case. Like, like all the, I don't know, if you sort of browse online, Whenever an ad for like, oh, this cool new app on AI has... Yeah. It's always something where you go, but actually you don't need that.

Like it's like beyond doing computer programming, which AI is clearly very good at. Nobody's invent, like all the things about like... And now you can book dinner and, you know, without having to browse all the great restaurants that are near you. And you're going, but half the point about booking a nice dinner for the person that you love is, browsing the nice restaurant for the knee. So they've just added Alexa for shopping into the Amazon app.

Right. Which I just like, I can't quite imagine that being useful. And they're just wedging in and everywhere trying at market share. But the thing is, yeah, I don't see how this is useful. We can guarantee that series summary of the key points of your day is going to be useless.

But Charles, also, there is some, as you were mentioning before, there's the much creepier version of this where people have little badges or little pendants around their neck that actually do record everything for the entire day. Yes. Or there's a little credit card size product. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of them.

And look, I've used the thing where you add an AI agent to a Zoom meeting or something and it gives you a summary of all the action points you've agreed on. That's actually not bad. Like, that's one of the better uses of AI rather than having to do notes. It's generally right-ish. Like, it's not 100% right, but it's close enough that it will remind you what the actual agreed action points were. But it's interesting because on a previous project optics, we actually hired a note taker.

Did you? Yeah, because when you've got a properly funded production, you can do things like, like there's an actual sort of technical role, which is note taker that's actually quite an important thing. Sure. I've never been in such a well-resourced riders room. Yeah, exactly.

But the whole point is the note takers there, yeah, they compile the notes and they're fantastic and everything like that. You never really read them. What is useful is that they can, at a crucial moment where you're trying to think of a joke, come up with that joke for you because they've been part of the process and they're like a junior writer.

And they don't actually pay or giving credit. Yeah, exactly. Wow. They're the person who's watched you, you know, create this thing and then actually have a whole, you know, like they know everything. Right. And I feel like that's never going to be AI because that's not the point of creating things.

But the other thing is, I mean, if we'd had during the... Like, if your Apple Watch went, oh, I've got a really good joke for you. You just go, fuck off! The other thing is that during the most of the Chaser TV shows, the big ones, the last thing you would have wanted is a note taker because so many ideas suggested we were so appalling that we couldn't have anyone who wasn't part of the Criteracer in the room. It would just be litigation.

That's right. I can imagine. Yeah. Come back and work out. But also, similarly, you wouldn't want an AI recording all the stuff. God no. It's discoverable. Because that was the other thing that happened during the.

week is the judge went somebody some witness had uploaded all their notes into um ai and the judge went well therefore they're not protected by any sort of legal privilege because you've uploaded them into essentially public forum and so your opponent can see everything that you've been thinking about this court case all right so that's that's the apple problem you would never want like all lawyers will tell you turn off that turn off the stupid judge So anyway, so that's something to know about. I can't see the case. Next time you're driving drunk and you're talking to yourself about how, oh, I've just dead of 15 years.

I was robbed. I was so. Yeah. And then. Pay machine. And then you stole my idea. And then you crash into a tree. The police arrest you.

And then they can. No. Because they'll get more than 15 seconds later. Anyway, if the police happened to be right there within. set within 15th, anyway. But can't they do the Siri recap? Oh, yeah. The key action points.

Don't drive into tree. Yeah, okay. Oh, that would be very sad. Okay. So that's the Apple situation. So we're going to pivot to LG. We've got two minutes left in this episode. Do we?

Oh, God. Can we cut out the earlier conversation and just download the updates? No, it's all right. Well, let's do the LG. But let's have a break. Let's have some ads here. Yeah, yeah, right. The Chaser Report.

News you know you can't trust. Okay, so, Dom, I need your legal advice. Okay, LG. Which is, and look, I've asked my Apple Watch. It doesn't know shit. It only remembers 15 seconds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, my LG is, I think, intentionally trying to personally sabotage my evening.

Really? Yeah. And I think I need to sue somebody. I'm thinking it should be LG. But you trained as a lawyer 25 years ago. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think you're my best resource here.

Okay. That's so flattering. Which is every time... So I recently made the terrible mistake of updating the software. Oh, you don't want to do that. Yeah. Now I've got WebOS. WebOS 8 or something.

Something. Okay. Or 28 or 48 or something. And what it does now is instead of... There used to be a little... One of the tiles on the, you know, homepage was the last TV channel that you had watched. Yeah.

Okay. Like it in live, brought live... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. So when we... Charles watches live TV. Well,

just we watch SBS news, rather. And, and so it was always sort of set to SBS and you just, at 6.30pm, you turn on the TV

and you just go to that tile and watch the news. I'm so charmed that you watch linear television news. I know, my kids, it's... My kids compare it to,

you know, using a fax machine. Sure. All right, but be that as it may. Yep. So, But now... You must be very sad that Anton Enos is retiring.

But anyway. So I did... Oh, is he retired? He's retired. Just announced. Good on him, Tom. Yeah. I once sat next to him all night at the Logies.

That's fantastic guy. Beautiful guy. Yeah. Amazing. Like, because he's South Africa. You know he's South Africa. Yeah. It's amazing story.

What a great tribute to Antoninos, with whom Charles once had a good conversation a long time ago. If I only had a night. I had a night with him. Okay. Anyway, name drop. So, I don't mean, I don't mean, you know, Anthony counts as a name job.

That's so harsh. Thank you for your service, Anton. You're not quite a big enough name to count as a name. I feel like that's just a sort of. You think he's name dropping Charles Firth? Yeah, I think that's how it rolls. Noted. So on my LDTV now, if I turn it on,

that tile now just automatically returns to what Sky News is called now, which is News 24, every single time. time. And they've obviously done a commercial deal so that it doesn't default at the channel that you've just been watching. It defaults that, like, you've got to look up some fucking bullshit internet channel that LG is invented called Channel 104s, I mean. Right.

And it's just a bullshit, bullshit fucking thing. And the terrible thing is that every time I turn, every single time I turn it on, it's Peter Credlin. Because obviously her show must be on at 6 or 630 or something of that. So you, Antonez has been replaced by Peter Credlin. Yeah. So literally, and I have to scroll down, I have to scroll down, 74 channels.

Said what? To get to, to, to SBS. The only way to change the channels is. It's actually Janice Peterson, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's just destroyed my life. It's like 15 seconds of my life taken out. And we know how long that is.

So hang on. So you're saying, they've done some deal with News 24 for prominent. And what I'm saying, yeah. the whole thing is now just ads, right? It's all ads for everything, right? And they've obviously gone, oh, well, let's sacrifice the complete usability is fucking TV. So you have, so you paid quite, it's a big TV.

It's a fucking great TV. Charles got this really big, lovely new TV. Yeah, to watch optics on your show. And then it got axed. And then, oh, I did one series. Yeah, we did one series. You know, didn't get axed mid series. That's happened to us at that time.

Anyway, um, not axed, but suspended anyway. That's another story. But, okay, so you're saying they've done some, it shouldn't really be allowed. should it. It has completely different interface than the one that you bought. Yeah, no, it's a fucking bullshit, bullshit. But also, they're getting paola, presumably, from whoever. Yes, exactly. But it's so evil, because what it is, I mean, it doesn't affect me, right, because I have my brain still.

But think of all the sort of boomers. And look, I know that there's boomers who listen to this podcast, and I'm not saying you. But aren't they the ones who watch Peter Credlin? But, you know, yes, exactly, no, but they get infected with these sorts of extremist views. And it's like literally, like somebody's paid someone to actually put in front of our parents who don't know better these horrible opinions every night. And they can just get away with it because what, capitalism. Like, I don't think, like, surely there's some sort of ACMA broad, this is where the legal advice comes in. Like, surely that's a breach of common decency.

There must be some piece of legislation that goes, you can't fucking default a TV. to fucking Sky News. Like that is just, that is beyond the, that is obscenity law, sedition. Like, what is it? Treason. You could argue that you're not getting what you pay for. Yes. You paid for a TV.

And it falls in a deceptive misleading, which is actually what Petty Kredland does in a TV show. So, well, the good news, Charles, is that you didn't just buy a Sky News machine. It's now called News 34. It's so awkward. I mean, clearly because. Yeah, News 24. You know what the really awkward thing is about that, just as a sidebar? News is not owned by Murdoch.

That's, no, this is what's happened. So their contract with B-SkyB, the British Sky TV, ran out. And yeah, Murdoch doesn't own that anymore because of the whole phone hacking thing. But Murdoch still wanted to invade the brains of Australia. So they, so after the deal ran out. So they had to work out what brand they should use. And of course, they're News Corp, so they're thinking more News Corp 24. It's the news logo that we'd handwriting with 24.

The awkward thing is, Charles, that for many, years, the ABC's news channel was called ABC News 24. Because it's Channel 24. Yeah, it's literally Channel 24. And it's not called that anymore. It's just called ABC News. But imagine if they had ever, if any of them had ever watched the ABC, this is the awkwardness, right? Oh, yeah. They would know that News 24, everyone still associates with the ABC. And they wouldn't have called that genuinely awkward. So you're saying that all the grannies are turning on the LG TVs and they're going, oh, Peter Creadlin's on ABC News now. Where's David Spears?

Oh, I like this factless turn that the ABC's made. But Charles, not only did you buy that. I like the idea of not actually covering anything, but just ranting. But at the same time, it turns out that LG, and this is a YouTube channel called Gamers Nexus went and looked at this. Apparently, LG TVs scan your entire internet connections and log all of the devices that are connected and what they're called. And then LG's going to be embedded. Algae. LG's actually advertised that they can reach 363 million addressable secondary devices in the US. So they can give you all that information. And the worry is that then...

Would you totally buy that information? But it also... We should. It'd be very helpful. But it also... And use it to target the Chaser report at LG users. Well, if LG is willing to put the Chaser report on the homepage of... No, I'm just... No, we'll have to pay them. But if we buy their data, we can, you know, work out a way... We'd have to change the content a little bit. So it goes... You have to be more unhinged and right wing. There's also a thing called automated content recognition where it samples what is actually

being said in your room. It actually records what's going on in your room. The LG TV. The LG TVs. Now, this is, so do you think that's denied this? No, that's what's happened. That's exactly what's happened.

They've heard you. It's been listening to me and they've gone, oh, this is a lefty. And they've used Siri. And they've said, Siri, given what Charles believes and his family believes, what's the most appropriate channel. And Siri has responded with complete moronicness and gone, News 24. Yeah. Because Siri still thinks it's the ABC.

Oh, there you go. So the researchers found this out. A compromised LG TVs, like if you hacked one, it can actually capture audio even when the TV appears to be off, records it, and then you can potentially download it remotely. So an LG have clearly not, so maybe you should update your TV when they're fixes. But supposedly, we've now got all these listening devices in our lounge rooms that could in theory be compromised and used to listen to you. So if you're worried that someone's listening into you and you have an LG smart TV, then, you know, perhaps they are. So one way to fix this is to disconnect it from the internet.

Right. In which case you wouldn't have. So I can't actually watch anything that I want to watch. No, you can't use any of smart TV. just don't use Netflix. So make it a dumb TV. Yeah. Great.

So I'll get, what, what is it? You can get another lovely company. Deal or no deal, I can watch. You could get one of those chrome sticks and put it in so that Google can surveil you instead. No, well, my solution was going to be to get an Apple TV, but it sounds like Siri's going to be listening to me as well. Well, this is the big question. Who's creepy surveillance? Do you trust the most, I suppose?

You know. We don't use WebOS in my house. We've just got an Apple TV and we use that. What do we need? Chaser OS. Chaser O. And it does listen to you, but only for the purposes of insulting you. No.

Krikk to record all the prompts. Only for good lines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's good. Just interjects with a joke. Mention something inappropriate when you're trying to have a serious conversation. Can we do that? It's a very useful function.

Blue sky. All right. I reckon we can race. You can hack that together with, can't you vibe code that in Claude? Yeah, I'll vibe code it, yeah. All right. Very good. So there you go.

Genuinely concerned about the LG. I'm going to go and unplug it. Hey, Dom, sorry, I didn't quite catch it. Can I just refer to my phone? Sure. Do of my watch to just find out what you see. Actually, not having to listen to you. Generally a recap is sounding better and better.

We're part of the Iconicless network. We'll catch you tomorrow.