# Friend pendant: what the AI that listens to you really hides # Friend pendant: what the AI that listens to you really hides The **Friend pendant** is that strange object you may have seen in the subway, on minimalist and slightly scary posters. A small plastic disc worn around the neck, which listens all the time to what happens around you and answers through notifications on your phone. Its promise is noble: **fighting loneliness** with a digital companion powered by the most advanced artificial intelligence models. Behind these fine words, however, hides something much darker. An always-on microphone, conversations sent to third-party servers, no recording indicator, an unprecedented attack surface, and a legal framework that simply wearing the object can be enough to violate. Friend is clearly not your friend, whatever its marketing claims. This article analyses the genesis of the product, its technical architecture, its vulnerabilities, its legal and ethical implications, and explains why we advise against buying it. {{< admonition abstract "In brief" >}} - **Friend**: a pendant under two inches, no screen and no speaker, created by Avi Schiffmann after pivoting his productivity project "Tab". - **1.8 million dollars** spent on the friend.com domain name, out of an initial 2.5 million raise. - **Constant passive listening** within 2 to 3 metres, transcription by Claude 3.5 Sonnet or Gemini 2.5. - **Risks**: acoustic command injection, immature firmware, data subject to the retention policies of cloud subcontractors. - **Law**: recording third parties without consent is punished by one year in prison and a 45,000 euro fine in France (article 226-1 of the Criminal Code). - **Market**: 3,000 units sold at launch, vandalised posters, an "AI wearable" that is not taking off. {{< /admonition >}} {{< youtube QZ3MGCHppm0 >}} ## What is the Friend pendant? Friend is an "emotional toy", in its creator's own words, aimed at Generations Z and Alpha. The object is a plastic disc under two inches, deliberately minimalist to encourage permanent wear. It has no screen and no speaker and communicates exclusively through text notifications on the user's smartphone. Behind this apparent simplicity hides a complex cloud infrastructure that transcribes, analyses and memorises what the pendant hears. ## The genesis: from a productivity tool to a digital companion The story of Friend is inseparable from that of its creator, **Avi Schiffmann**. Famous at 17 for building one of the most visited COVID-19 tracking websites in the world, he embodies the Silicon Valley prodigy, able to pivot quickly with market trends. The initial project was not about friendship but about **productivity**. Named **Tab**, it was designed to record meetings and organise professional tasks, for a price of 600 dollars. Faced with competition from giants like Apple or OpenAI in that niche, Schiffmann radically changes course towards "emotional toys" and the fight against loneliness, a real issue: one person in ten in France lives in total isolation. The pivot begins with the purchase of the friend.com domain name for the astronomical sum of **1.8 million dollars**, the major share of an initial 2.5 million dollar fundraise from investors such as Solana or Perplexity. The product is powered by the latest language models from Anthropic and Google. ## How does Friend work technically? The pendant relies on a single **MEMS microphone**, able to capture ambient audio within a radius of 2 to 3 metres. This is **constant** passive listening, whereas an assistant like Siri waits for a wake word. The audio is not stored in full on the device, whose memory is too limited. It is transmitted over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to the mobile app, which applies voice activity detection algorithms. The retained segments are then sent to Anthropic's **Claude 3.5 Sonnet** or **Google Gemini 2.5**, which transcribe the speech, analyse the emotional context and generate a response. Memory management is the most critical aspect of the system. The manufacturer states that "data is not stored beyond the AI's context window". {{< admonition info "The context window, in two words" >}} In a large language model, the context window is the amount of text (tokens) the model can process at once. For Claude, about 200,000 tokens, hundreds of pages. It is not unlimited: the system therefore has to produce **summaries** to keep long-term memory, with an obvious risk of sensitive information persisting, over which the user has no control. {{< /admonition >}} ## The vulnerabilities of a spy at home ### Acoustic command injection Friend creates an **unprecedented attack surface**. The main technical risk identified is acoustic command injection. The pendant processes everything it hears within 2 to 3 metres: a physically present attacker, or a mere audio source nearby, can utter instructions hidden in a conversation or in music, and manipulate the AI's behaviour. The assistant could then extract personal information from the history or send messages without its owner's knowledge. It is, for a voice device, the equivalent of the [prompt injection threatening AI agents](/en/when-ai-assistants-go-off-the-rails/). ### A fragile supply chain Where smartphones benefit from decades of security research and regular updates, objects like Friend often rely on less mature firmware. One vulnerability in the update protocol is enough to turn the pendant into an active, remotely controlled bug. ### The risk of data leaks The manufacturer claims not to keep audio recordings after processing. Reality is more complex: the transcription necessarily goes through Anthropic's or Google's servers, and the data is therefore subject to the retention policies of these cloud subcontractors. Conversation fragments, technical logs, unintentional reuse for later model training: the risk is high. At the time of writing, no evidence of an independent security audit of the product has been published. ## Legal and ethical framework: an outlaw pendant? ### Recording others without their consent The pendant also captures the voices of **everyone present** in its immediate surroundings. Wearing such a device in a professional, medical or educational setting can constitute a criminal offence. In France, article 226-1 of the Criminal Code protects the intimacy of private life and punishes the recording of privately spoken words without the consent of their author with one year of imprisonment and a 45,000 euro fine. The CNIL has, moreover, started examining Friend's GDPR compliance. ### The absence of a recording indicator One of the major weaknesses of Friend's design is the absence of a clear recording indicator. Meta's smart glasses have an LED. Friend is designed to be discreet. A frightening subtlety, which turns every social interaction into potential data collection. ### Worrying terms of use The privacy policies make these fears worse: the company reserves the right to use the data for "personalisation", "research" and to "comply with legal obligations". In the event of an acquisition or bankruptcy, your conversations could change hands without your consent. ### A real cure for loneliness? Replacing human empathy with "machine affirmation" could worsen social isolation rather than solve it. Avi Schiffmann himself added fuel to the fire by comparing the interaction with Friend to a conversation with "God or a higher power", a heavily criticised stance for generations that are already over-connected. {{< admonition danger "The Character.ai precedent" >}} The suicide of a 14-year-old teenager who had an intimate relationship with a chatbot on Character.ai was a reminder of the limits of these digital companions: no clinical guardrails, no real understanding of human distress, and a risk of reinforcing negative thoughts. {{< /admonition >}} ## A launch marked by rejection Friend's launch came with a wave of rejection: one million dollars invested in a massive advertising campaign in the New York subway, **11,000 posters** systematically vandalised, and the same fate in Paris. Schiffmann justified it by explaining that the empty spaces on the posters invited reactions. Sales are stagnating: **3,000 units** sold at launch, 350,000 dollars in revenue, derisory compared to the millions invested in marketing. More broadly, "AI wearables" are not taking off: the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 both received scathing reviews. ## Frequently asked questions about the Friend pendant ### Does the Friend pendant record all the time? Yes. Its microphone continuously captures ambient audio within 2 to 3 metres. The app filters the segments containing speech before sending them to the AI models for transcription and analysis. ### Where does the data captured by Friend go? Audio segments are sent over Bluetooth to the smartphone, then transcribed and analysed by models hosted at Anthropic or Google. The manufacturer says it does not keep the audio after processing, but transcriptions and summaries persist in the system's memory, and the data passes through cloud subcontractors. ### Is it legal to wear Friend in France? The object itself is legal, but recording private conversations without the consent of the people present is punished by article 226-1 of the Criminal Code. Wearing it in a professional, medical or educational setting therefore exposes the user to prosecution. ### What are the alternatives to Friend? Classic voice assistants (activated by a wake word, with a light indicator) offer a more respectful compromise. Against loneliness, human helplines and specialised associations remain the recommended answers. ## Key takeaways The Friend pendant is symptomatic of an era in which technology seeks to saturate the last corners of private life. If innovation is needed to break isolation, it must not come at the cost of our fundamental security and our right to unmonitored intimacy. These pendants will remain objects of distrust, symbols of a technology that listens to us but does not really understand us. {{< admonition tip "Connected devices in the workplace" >}} Smart speakers, smart badges, pendants: the connected devices entering your premises are part of your attack surface. Our [penetration tests](https://trackflaw.com/services) cover these peripherals and their companion apps. {{< /admonition >}} ## Sources - Friend, [official website](https://friend.com) - Avi Schiffmann, [ncov2019.live](https://ncov2019.live/), the COVID-19 tracking website - Légifrance, [Article 226-1 of the French Criminal Code](https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000006417929)