Apple Watches with Cameras
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter, Apple is looking at adding cameras to upcoming Apple Watch models:
But Apple’s vision for AI wearables goes even further. The company is working on new versions of the Apple Watch that include cameras. As with the future AirPods, this would help the device see the outside world and use AI to deliver relevant information. These models are likely still at least generations away from hitting the market, but they are on the road map.
The cameras would obstensably allow users to use Visual Intelligence to receive information about items or their surroundings the same way you can use Visual Intelligence on a phone. I don't know much about how this works because I don't use Apple Intelligence or even Siri for that matter. (I should at least read up on it a bit more!) I would imagine, however, that processing that kind of information has to be done off device in Apple's cloud servers since it is dealing with images and dynamic information.
Again, this is something I can't figure out the purpose of other than mass collecting of data. Apple states in it's Apple Intelligence privacy policy:
When your device sends a request to Private Cloud Compute, Apple only collects limited information about the request, such as the approximate size of the request and response, which features are used for the request, and how long the request takes to complete. This data does not include any information about the content of your request or the returned result. It is not identifiable or linked to your Apple Account or other data Apple may have from your use of > other Apple services.
I would take the words "such as" to just be examples of the types of data collected and not an exhaustive list. What does "does not include any information about the content" mean exactly? Would location data be information about the content?
A use case I frequently see for this is you could point your phone/watch at a business and get its hours of operation. If I can point my phone/watch at it and take a picture of it, why wouldn't I just ready the hours of operation on the door myself?