News

Aug 14, 2023

Rewind Records Everything You Do in iPhone Safari

But GPT-4 integration raises privacy concerns Rewind.ai Remember the Rewind app that video-captures your computer screen and does OCR and speech-to-text so you can search everything? It's back and on

But GPT-4 integration raises privacy concerns

Rewind.ai

Remember the Rewind app that video-captures your computer screen and does OCR and speech-to-text so you can search everything? It's back and on the iPhone.

The iPhone version of Rewind is Safari only, but it works the same way. It records a video screen capture of all your activity, then processes it, recognizing any text on those pages and cataloging it for search later. The idea is that it lets you find those snippets of web pages that you totally know you saw but can't remember where or when. The major concern with the desktop version was that it could amass a huge amount of private data on you. iOS is way more locked-down than the Mac, so is this better? Or worse?

"In theory, privacy shouldn't be a concern because everything the app records is processed locally. You don't have to upload data to another party's cloud to get results. However, if the app contained a vulnerability that hackers learned to exploit, then that would put users' recordings and the sensitive data they contain at risk," Paul Bischoff, privacy advocate with Comparitech, told Lifewire via email.

The desktop Rewind is an extremely useful tool, a kind of life-logger for your computer. By recording everything on your screen, plus any audio from, say, microphones, it could capture the entirety of your computer use. Then, it would use machine learning and on-device optical character recognition (OCR) to process everything into easily-searchable text.

We've all been there. You saw some interesting snippet of information, or you were shopping and found the perfect pair of shoes, or somebody mentioned something in a Slack chat or a Zoom call, but you cannot remember where you saw/heard it. Rewind finds it for you. And it gets even more useful the more time goes by, thanks to computers having much better memories than humans.

On the iPhone, thanks to Apple's security rules, Rewind only works in Safari. That limits its utility quite a bit compared to the desktop version, but on the other hand, the browser is probably most people's most-used app. And as Rewind also imports your screenshots and indexes those, you can add data from any app just by capturing the screen.

Also new is GPT-4 integration, which you can use to search and aggregate your data—summarizing your emails, for example.

Soon after the launch of the original version, Rewind let slip that it used a cloud service for transcription. After a fuss erupted, it changed to on-device transcription, meaning no data would leave your device.

Rewind.ai

The iOS version is the same. All processing is done on the iPhone. But the very fact that a company dealing with such sensitive data would even think about using sending your data out to the cloud was a warning sign for some people.

Also, while the iPhone is pretty secure, you still may not want to keep such a rich data trove hanging around, even locally.

"Having a complete log of your browsing history and online activities could make you vulnerable to data breaches or unauthorized access if the app's data is not adequately protected," Pushkal Bajpai, business head at privacy-review company VPN Guide, told Lifewire via email. "Storage and performance impact: Constantly recording and storing browsing sessions may consume considerable storage space on your device and potentially impact its performance."

Then we get to that GPT integration called Ask Rewind. The problem with this is that to use it, some of your data does have to be sent to the cloud. In the FAQs at the bottom of the product page, you'll read the following:

"If you choose to use our meeting summarization or Ask Rewind features, only relevant text-based data is sent to our LLM partners."

In theory, privacy shouldn't be a concern because everything the app records is processed locally.

In a Twitter thread, co-founder and CEO of Rewind, Dan Siroker, is up-front about all of this, and any tool that offers to record and summarize your activity is always going to seem a bit creepy. Thanks to the possible privacy issues, it will always be a sensitive subject. But that doesn't mean it can't be done safely and properly.

And this is a pretty amazing tool to have, especially with the AI assistant that can pull all kinds of things from your personal data trove, put an end to note-taking, and so on. And presumably, with Apple's tight App Store security and privacy rules, it at least does what it claims to do.

Still not happy about such a tool? How about this: On the iPhone, you can search for text contained in any photos and screenshots, so you could just use that instead. It's way less convenient, and you'll be snapping a lot of screenshots, but it's a good trick nonetheless.

Get the Latest Tech News Delivered Every Day