Limitless.ai is selling a wearable pendant that promises its users will “never forget a thing.” Social posts show it clipped to a shirt, always listening, turning a user’s day into searchable memory. But what if you have no intention of buying one?
If you are a privacy-conscious person who carefully curates your digital footprint, you now have a massive new problem: other people.
Now that Limitless has been acquired by Meta, the stakes for bystanders are higher than ever. When your coworker, friend, or barista wears this device, your conversations, secrets, and passing thoughts are being captured and fed into Meta’s sprawling data ecosystem. If you are looking up the Limitless privacy policy (at limitless.ai/privacy-policy) wondering if you are safe, the reality is deeply concerning.
Here is what happens to your voice when you step into the radius of a Limitless Pendant.
The Burden of Consent is a Mirage
Limitless is explicit that this is not a passive note-taking app for the user alone. When someone uses the Pendant, the device captures audio from everyone in earshot.
According to the Limitless Privacy Policy, the device collects:
“We collect all audio captured by the Pendant or directly through the device on which the App is installed. Audio recordings... may include spoken audio and other information about the individuals you interact with or record, including individuals that you have a conversation with.”
That last sentence is the one that matters to you. It captures your voice in meetings, intimate coffee chats, and hallway conversations. And how does Limitless protect you, the non-user? By putting the legal burden entirely on the person wearing the device:
“It is your responsibility to inform other conversation partners of this Privacy Policy and provide notice to and obtain consent from all individuals with whom you interact with when recording via the Pendant...”
Let’s be realistic: almost no one is going to read you a Miranda-style privacy warning before chatting with you at a party. There is no automated bystander notice or blaring red light. You are being recorded, and Meta legally washes its hands of how that audio was obtained.
Your Voice Will Train Meta’s AI Models
For a product marketed as a personal memory assistant, the most consequential line for non-users is buried in “How We Use the Information We Collect.”
Limitless states that your audio is used:
“To train, develop, and improve artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other large language models;”
Your private conversations are not just sitting in your friend’s personal vault. Now that Meta is at the helm, your voice memos, casual jokes, and derived transcripts can become training material for the parent company’s massive AI models. The policy also allows generating “de-identified, anonymized or aggregate data” for “any legal purpose.” You didn’t opt into this, but your daily life is now feeding the machine.
The Vendor Chain: Your Words Leave the Building
Even with Meta’s massive infrastructure, Limitless does not process everything in-house. Under “How We Disclose the Information We Collect,” the Privacy Policy notes that your recorded audio gets shipped out to third parties:
“We also disclose some of your information to artificial intelligence services... For example, if you use the Pendant or App, we send audio recordings or transcripts to our third-party AI providers who assist us in providing the Services, including for transcription and summarization purposes.”
Audio also goes to cloud-based storage services and analytics vendors. Each hop adds another vendor’s security practices and breach surface. That means your off-the-cuff remarks are bouncing between Meta’s servers and an untold number of third-party transcription vendors.
Indefinite Storage: Your Mistakes Live Forever
Limitless gives its users retention controls, but look closely at what that means for you, the person being recorded:
“If you are a Pendant user, you have the ability to choose retention periods for your audio recordings... including the ability to retain such information indefinitely. We do not delete the information that you choose to retain indefinitely.”
Indefinite retention is offered as a user choice, not as a privacy safeguard. If your coworker opts in—or simply never bothers to change the default settings—Meta and Limitless keep the data containing your voice for as long as they allow.
The Stub Page vs. The Real Policy
Clerica’s automated analysis currently flags one clause on the shorter, more user-friendly limitless.ai/privacy page: a redirect telling users to read a section called “Talking to Someone Wearing the Pendant” for recording details.
Treating that redirect as the whole story misses the substantive clauses in the main Privacy Policy. The reality for non-users includes blanket audio capture, completely unrealistic user-borne consent obligations, AI model training under the Meta umbrella, third-party AI processing, and indefinite retention.
How to Protect Yourself in a Limitless World
You can no longer just manage your own devices; you have to manage your environment. If you see someone wearing a Limitless Pendant, keep these realities in mind before you speak:
- You are the training data: Are you comfortable with your casual conversations feeding Meta’s daily model development?
- The consent loophole: The person wearing the device is supposed to warn you, but rarely will. Assume the mic is always hot.
- The vendor chain: Your words are being transcribed and summarized by third-party AI providers under Meta/Limitless’s vendor agreements, over which you have zero control.
- Forever storage: What you say today might be kept on a server indefinitely if the user never deletes their logs.
- US processing: The policy states services are hosted in the United States and data may transfer there from other regions, subjecting your voice to US data laws regardless of where you live.
Perfect memory sounds futuristic for the user, but for the rest of us, the policy reads like an always-on Meta surveillance program disguised as jewelry.
Monitor policy changes on services your friends and colleagues use — free at clerica.io/kickstarter. Clerica is not a law firm; this is educational information, not legal advice.
If you liked anything about the article or about Clerica in general, please consider following our socials to keep us motivated, and to stay up to date!