Apple acquires ‘secretive’ Israeli facial surveillance firm in undisclosed deal
Apple has acquired Israeli startup company Q.ai, said to have technology that enables facial recognition and the analysis of “silent speech” through subtle facial expressions.
Founded in 2002 and labelled “secretive” by the Financial Times, the company is reported to have been developing systems that interpret whispered or mouthed speech by tracking facial skin micro-movements.
According to multiple outlets, including Reuters and FT, the deal is priced at around $1.5–2 billion. Apple has, however, refused to disclose the financial terms of the deal.
If the deal goes through, it would be Apple’s second-largest acquisition after Beats in 2014, and as part of the deal, would bring Q.ai founders Aviad Maizels, Yonatan Wexler, and Avi Barliya into the company.
Raising questions about surveillance, biometric monitoring, and emotion detection embedded directly into consumer devices, the company’s work on interpreting signals such as lip movement, heart rate, and respiration has prompted concerns among privacy advocates about devices capable of inferring what users are saying or feeling without any audible speech.
Meanwhile, Apple has not explained how Q. ai’s technology will be deployed.
With the record of Israeli surveillance practices in the backdrop of this deal, the concerns are natural.
Israel has recently approved electronic monitoring bracelets that track movement and biometric data and function as mechanisms of population control over Palestinians living under Israel’s apartheid system.
According to The Cradle, Israel has transformed its campaign against Lebanon into a data-driven war of digital espionage, using mass surveillance, metadata harvesting, biometric tracking, and AI-powered targeting to locate and assassinate Hezbollah figures.
Everyday devices, civilian infrastructure, and even social environments have been turned into tools of algorithmic assassination, where machines increasingly decide who lives and who dies.
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