Friend's privacy policy puts bystander compliance on the wearer

The design

Friend is an AI-powered pendant made by Friend Global, Inc. The company's own privacy policy, dated 14 June 2025 and current as retrieved on 16 September 2026, describes the device as 'physical technology that is portable and carried on the user's person.' It states plainly that 'the Device is passively recording your surroundings, including video and audio content that may contain personal information.' Unlike a phone's microphone toggled on for a single call, the pendant's design is to keep listening as its default state, converting ambient audio and video into data the company processes and stores rather than data a wearer separately chooses to capture.

What the evidence says

The privacy policy and the company's own Terms of Service, both last updated the same day, state the same allocation of responsibility in near-identical language: the wearer, not Friend, is responsible for complying with 'privacy and video surveillance laws' in their jurisdiction, and 'capturing, recording or sharing video or audio content that involves other people... may unlawfully affect their privacy rights.' The Terms add that Friend 'will endeavor to filter inappropriate content' but that the wearer agrees the company will not be held liable for claims arising from what the device records. Both documents are the company's own statements; no regulator's or court's review of this allocation appears in either.

What it asks of people

Wearing Friend asks the user to become the compliance officer for everyone who comes near the device, a role most bystanders never agree to and are not shown any notice of, since the policy describes no indicator, light or disclosure requirement aimed at third parties. It also asks for tolerance of a broad retention posture: the policy states data is kept 'as long as needed,' and separately that the company 'may keep your data for longer than 5 years' when it cannot delete it for legal, regulatory or technical reasons.

Privacy and safeguards

What is disclosed: that recording is continuous and passive, that the wearer bears legal responsibility for bystanders, and a retention regime that can extend past five years. What is not disclosed: any bystander-facing consent mechanism, an on-device indicator requirement, or an independent audit of how the stated content filtering performs. No cited source describes a regulator examining the pendant's bystander-recording design.

• Does anyone near a Friend wearer know the device is recording, and is that knowledge realistic to expect?
• What jurisdiction's surveillance law applies when the wearer and the recorded person are in different places?
• What does 'longer than 5 years' mean in practice for audio that captured someone who never consented?

The company's own documents place the legal and practical burden of always-on recording onto the person wearing the device, a design choice worth separating from any claim about how well the product filters or protects what it hears.