Someone could use their iPhone to eavesdrop on your real-life conversations. A little-known feature called Live Listen makes it possible for anyone to leave their phone in a room and stream whatever you say to a pair of AirPods. You can disable this feature on your iPhone now, but thwarting others is more complicated.
Live Listen isn’t a new feature in iOS. In fact, it’s been on your iPhone since 2014, at least in some form. When it launched, it only worked in tandem with a pair of hearing aids wirelessly connected to the host iPhone. Compatibility was limited by design, but then again, Apple didn’t yet have wireless earbuds of its own to make it more accessible, so hearing aids were the target device for the first several years.
Even though Live Listen is disabled on your iPhone, that doesn’t stop somebody else from using Live Listen on their iPhone.
Live Listen is simple. Meant to help the hearing impaired, it uses the connected iPhone as a remote microphone to relay the sound it captures to a connected pair of hearing aids on the other end. The hearing aids then receive that sound and relay it directly to the wearer’s ears to help them hear better.
So instead of forcing someone with a hearing impairment to get closer to what they want to hear — the TV, a radio, another person — they can sit their phone down beside the sound and let it pump audio back to the hearing aids for easy listening.
Apple eventually brought this technology to its wireless earbuds after it launched the AirPod series in 2016. Since then, Live Listen hasn’t received much more attention, but it’s always been there, ready to stream a conversation to a connected listening device on demand.
Like any helpful feature, Live Listen can be used for good, and it can also be abused. For instance, someone could leave their phone in a room where an important conversation is taking place and listen in from a distance through a pair of connected AirPods.
AirPods have a Bluetooth range of 30 to 100 feet, depending on who you ask. That means someone could potentially listen to a conversation from up to 33 yards away, turning it into a long-range spy tool that is hard to detect. Live Listen can even generate transcripts of the conversations it hears, making it even more dangerous.
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Live Listen is buried deep in the Settings app, relegated to a place where few would find it, unless they know where to look. Even now, it could be enabled, ready to start listening at the push of a button. That doesn’t mean it will start to record on its own though. There are a couple of requirements that must be met before Live Listen hears conversations.
The first thing you need is a pair of connected hearing aids, AirPods, or compatible Beats wireless headphones. Live Listen will not work with other third-party hardware. Second, you have to add the Live Listen icon to your Control Center setup and press it to activate. Without that, you can’t start a listening session.
Ultimately, without these two things, Live Listen is rendered useless and harmless. Still, for extra peace of mind, you might want to disable Live Listen to make sure it doesn’t run amok, either from a bug or some unknown exploit.
To disable Live Listen, open the Settings app on your iPhone and tap “Accessibility.” Choose “Audio & Visual” in the “Hearing” section, followed by “Live Listen.” Turn the “Remote Control” option off so that the toggle is grayed out. Now Live Listen can’t be activated from Control Center or through any other method.
Live Listen Settings on iOS 27.2/Zach Laidlaw
Keep in mind that even though Live Listen is disabled on your iPhone, that doesn’t stop somebody else from using it on their iPhone. Theoretically, someone could still leave their device behind and listen to your conversations, and since there isn’t a notification or alert to indicate when Live Listen is active, you won’t even know when it’s happening.
The best you can do is be aware of your surroundings. Take note of any iPhones you find unattended in places where important conversations are conducted — an office, bedroom, church, etc. The microphone on an iPhone needs to be relatively close to a speaker — within three to 15 feet — to clearly pick up what someone says, but it can capture muddled audio that’s good enough for a recording from even farther away.
Live Listen is similar to another audio detection feature coming to some Apple Watch models soon. Part of Apple’s growing Apple Intelligence suite, Audio Intelligence, includes Siri Recap, which monitors your surroundings for conversations that it can turn into “high-level notes” you read on Apple Watch or iPhone. Unlike Live Listen, Siri Recap doesn’t keep a recording to replay later, but it will write a summary of the conversation it heard, all transcribed with Apple’s Private Cloud Compute AI platform.
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Privacy concerns, Spying, Iphone, Apple, Privacy, Privacy and security, Tech
