The next time someone sits across from you at a kopitiam wearing AirPods, those earbuds might be quietly watching the room on their behalf. Apple is building a camera into its AirPods, and a leak this week gave everyone their first real look at how it would work.
Apple accidentally shipped a demo video inside a test build of its Mac software, macOS Tahoe 26.7, showing the camera-equipped earbuds in action. As Engadget reported, the AirPods carry a low-resolution camera that feeds whatever you are looking at to Siri, through a feature Apple calls Visual Intelligence. In the clip a man asks Siri to remember a book he is holding, and the voiceover replies, "With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes saveable." The earbuds look like today's AirPods Pro with a slightly thicker stem, and the cameras themselves are not even visible.
According to 9to5Mac, Apple is developing two versions, codenamed B790 and B798, both first tipped by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The leak had many expecting a reveal at next month's iPhone event, but Gurman now reports the camera AirPods remain on track for 2027, after slipping from an earlier 2026 target over supply and software problems. The cameras are meant to scan your surroundings for context, not to shoot photos or video, and may carry a small light to show when they are active. That has not stopped critics online from nicknaming them "pervertpods."
Table of Contents
What a wearable camera means in Malaysia
This is where it gets complicated for us. A device that constantly scans a room and sends what it sees to an AI in the cloud is, in plain terms, a sensor pointed at everyone nearby, not just the person wearing it. Malaysia's Personal Data Protection Act already treats footage that can identify a person as personal data, and a 2024 amendment tightened it further, adding biometric data to the "sensitive" category and raising the maximum penalty to RM1 million from April 2025.
The problem is that the PDPA was written for businesses handling customer records and for fixed cameras like CCTV, where a sign on the wall can warn people they are being filmed. It was not built for a stranger on the LRT whose earbuds are silently reading the carriage. There is no notice, no sign, and no realistic way for the people around the wearer to say yes or no. That gap is not Apple's alone to close, and it is the same tension Malaysia is already wrestling with elsewhere. We wrote recently about how the country's new online safety rules demand hard age checks that global apps still do not perform, and about Apple's own privacy stumble with Private Relay leaking real IP addresses.
Why this is coming anyway
Apple is not first here. Camera glasses and AI wearables have been creeping into public life for two years, and the whole industry is betting that an assistant which can see what you see is the next interface after the phone. For a company that has spent a decade selling privacy as a feature, shipping something people are already calling a surveillance device is a real contradiction, and Malaysian buyers who trust the brand for exactly that reason will have to weigh it. The same Visual Intelligence push is why Apple is now paying publishers to feed news into Siri, so these earbuds are one piece of a much bigger plan to put an AI between you and the world around you.
Nothing ships until 2027, so there is time to get the rules right. The harder question tends to arrive before the product does: who protects the person who never agreed to be seen?
Images courtesy of Shawnn Tan and Bai on Unsplash.
