Flock Cameras, Meta Glasses and the Surveillance Backlash

Also, you cannot optimize. Naps. Sorry. Just really. You can't and also babies aren't doing many crimes

“Clean the babies out of it. No crime in babies and if they are, we'll take care of that one baby. Very clever baby”

Hi everyone from New York Magazine in the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. Fox safety, the company that makes the automated license plate reader or a LPR cameras, used by over 7,000 law enforcement agencies across the country is on the receiving end of a public backlash against surveillance tech.

“According to Washington Post, only half of Americans surveyed in an August poll said they opposed a L PRs.”

But the opposition is part of a long simmering mistrust of big tech and concerns over privacy and data security. Today we're talking with a panel of experts about how the backlash to flock and street surveillance cameras squares with the boom in wearable tech in AI powered smart devices and what's at stake in the tradeoff between privacy and security.

This is one of the most important topics of the day around tech is what these companies are collecting, what they're doing with it.

“And what you need to know to protect yourself, you are a guinea pig to these companies who are only interested in shareholder value. They are not interested in you. They're not interested in protecting you.”

They're interested in using you because they are at heart, rapacious information thieves. This is a word, what Mossberg used decades ago and remains even more true in the age of AI where they need more information to serve their corporate purposes.

Jason Kepler is a co-founder of 404 media. He and his colleagues have been reporting on flock for the past few years along with a lot of other amazing reporting they do at 404 media.

Dr. Sophia Umoja Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and a professor at the University of California Los Angeles. She is the director of the Center on Resilience and Digital Justice and is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. She's also the author of Algorithms of a press and how search engines reinforce racism. Victoria Song is a senior reviewer for the verge and the author of the optimizer newsletter. She specializes in emerging technologies in wearables, health, fitness and XR. Our expert question day comes from one of my favorite journalists cybersecurity experts and author Nicole Pearl Roth. So stick around.

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And unlike ice cream it won't trip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture does anyone have any cash give it a try mid mobile dot com slash switch. A friend payment of $45 for three months ninety dollars for six months or one hundred eighty dollars for twelve one plan required fifteen dollars for money to tax isn't the extra new customer offer for initial plan for money greater than fifty gigabytes me slow and work is busy c-terms. I'm I'm a garden. I have a new podcast called happy hour with on a each week. I'm inviting a really interesting guest to join me for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York.

I'll be getting personal with actors chefs, comedians, musicians and writers I admire. So grab a snack, pull up a chair, and join us you can watch by searching for a happy hour with on a new tube or listen wherever you get your podcasts don't we only have more fun. Jason Sophia and Victoria thank you for coming on on. Thanks much for having me. Thanks for having me too. So many of us obviously willingly share personal data with technology every day all the time from smart phone apps smart watches fitness rings doorbell cameras yet flock safeties automated license plate reader which has been around a while these cameras have sparked remarkable public backlash given how embedded data collecting tech is in our lives.

everyone's been carrying around since you smart phones surveillance devices for a long time. Jason you go first and Sofia and then Victoria.

“Yeah, it's a great question and it's one that I've thought about a lot recently. I think that flock has become this avatar for people to push back against surveillance that they”

Know that they're subjected to I think that a lot of the things that you mentioned are consumer products where people are getting some sort of trade-off like they feel like they can't necessarily opt out of having a smart phone or opt out of social media But here they have these like very public cameras that are showing up in their neighborhoods. They're driving around. They're saying what is this? And there's actually a place for them to push back against it Which is their local city council meetings? I think it's very hard for an individual person or small group of people to push back against meta or Google or

You know these big tech giants, but you can show up at a city council and say What are these cameras? I don't want them and yell at the mayor yell at the city council right a lot like data centers They're they're articulating AI through data centers. They're issues with AI in a lot of ways because they're physical right standing in their communities

“Sophia. Yeah, I think that's true Jason's got it right and also we see them disproportionately”

installed around our cities. So I think you know these are again very clear signals about who is the target of surveillance and a much more direct and visible way The other thing is that you know this kind of promise of Security and surveillance which is the way they're sold, but of course, you know these broken windows theories these ideas that you know If we kind of put visible improvement into our communities it will produce crime

We actually see that these are used to in snare and in trap people and that is actually how people relate to them in some ways It's like the over policing That black and brown communities and working class and poor communities have been used to only now. It's permanent

“And it's actually difficult to evade. Right Victoria. Yeah, I think it's basically to what Jason's point was like these consumer devices that you give up your privacy”

For you're getting a personal benefit out of it with a smartwatch you are getting health data or you know

These tech ads are always saying that the album watch is gonna save your life or something like that

With the meta glasses, you might get cute footage of a pet or your kids with the flat camera You know that there is no benefit to you. You're just being watched and it It kind of makes you feel like a subject instead of the Person in control. So I think that's a big aspect of it and then another aspect is I think there's an increased amount of distrust for the person behind the other side of the camera And in previous years like we used to believe that tech was going to improve everything and now with the backlash against AI with the backlash against all of these devices that want to know

And increasing amount about you. I just think people are just increasingly distrustful of those things and those things are combining together So Jason, you and your team at 404 media have been covering Fox since 2024 and you're reporting prompted congressional inquiry of the company last year Four of four reporting shows that Flock cameras have been used to help ice and surveil no kings protests Please say Flock camera networks have enabled them to solve thousands of crimes including car thefts missing persons and abducted children

And explain people what Flock cameras do how long they've been around and how they're connected to the network and how the data is stored Yeah, so Flock cameras are automatic license plate reader cameras, which is a technology that's been around for more than a decade now But what Flock did was they essentially network these together using artificial intelligence. That is the big differentiating factor of Flock from its competitors where they put them at intersections or on the street and when you drive by it

Essentially takes a photo of your car and adds it to a database that can be queried by the police at any point

And there's no warrant requirement for that, but basically

Whereas in the past if a police department had these ALPR cameras, they could only search the cameras in that individual town Right now Flock is in 40% of the United States and in many cases cops are able to search not just the 15 cameras or 20 cameras that are in their town But thousands in their state or more than a hundred thousand across the entire country and so You know, that's a very diverse country where the local needs are different in different places and I think what happened was cities We're signing up for this thinking oh, we're gonna use this to find missing children or stolen cars and they woke up one day and

Realize that it was being used by cops for states over to search for undocumented immigrants or to search for a wound who had an abortion or By cops to stalk exes things like this and I think that's part of the the backlash is that I think a lot of

It was 30 days flock has recently made some revisions where they're going to recommend that it's stored for seven days at a time

“That is not mandatory I believe but that they're sort of pushing cops to have a seven-day retention period”

Right, it doesn't mean people couldn't copy the material correct that and then also I mean you could query it kind of over and over again over time. Yeah Yeah, absolutely and the companies responded to the reports of abuse and the guard rails This is only a shorter data time frame or well they've done a few things and I think that that's the that's the big thing is that flock Built this network by sort of going town to town city the city saying

You know by our technology a lot of these were pitched as pilot programs over bought using police discretionary funds Meaning it didn't go through like a formal city council approval process and some cases it did but I think a lot of people will go up one day and

Said what are these cameras when did they get here like how did this all occur and

There have been all of these cases of abuse and flock has made some revisions. They've you know Try to reduce the length of time that the data is retained They've tried to do like automatic auditing for anomalous searches meaning if a cop is searching the same license plate over and over and over again That might mean that they are Stalking someone but what happened was the company didn't anticipate these problems ahead of time

And so it's fixing it now and now it's saying What's the problem like why are you mad at us right? Well, it reminds you of Facebook like I didn't know people were going to do that Amazon's ring one of the largest home security camera companies in the U.S. has been criticized in the past for its relationship Law enforcement and the company ended its partnership with flock earlier this year

Ring is now updating its technology aiming to prevent third parties from viewing customers home security

“Forged without their consent Victoria. Is this latest move just a response to flock and do surveillance anxiety or is something else happen?”

I think it's just a lot of different companies at the same time are kind of dealing with this like I just saw the apple of Like yesterday and you know The first thing they did was they were talking about privacy and how that relates to the new apple watch Audio intelligence features and I really feel that a lot of that messaging was in response to the backlash not only from flock But also from the meta glasses that have been around

People calling those pervert glasses and everything so I do think that By and large because we're moving into AI being pervasive in our lives and AI only really works if it knows everything about you and so these companies are hungry to learn more about us from all of our devices It kind of creates this new tension that people are aware of like oh they eyes coming for my job AI also also coming for my personal data AI is coming for every aspect of my life and so

You know you have a pretty big public backlash against it and the companies have this you know incentive to push that on you and to kind of Lowly you into a sense of like no, no, no, we care about your privacy, but you know after decades of feeling like no You don't care about our privacy Full of too little too late. Absolutely. We'll get into meta glasses later by the way the technical term is creeper glasses Not pervert glasses, but flock's mission according to the companies to quote eliminate crime with the principle framework that protects privacy and promotes objectivity

Sophia given what you know about algorithmic bias, which we'll get in more into in a moment in the way these systems are built

“What do you make of this statement? Yeah, I mean, I think that the underlying”

Logics of so many of these systems is about using historical data to determine where hotspots are of concern and Of course, we know that communities of color black communities in particular have been overpoliced In fact the invention of policing is really about the monitoring of black people in this country all the way back to the kind of origin stories of the slave trade and the practice of enslavement

This system of enslavement in the United States and so When you think about the kind of historical data that is used and this is this you know predates flock and ring with software like predpoll we know that Using these kinds of systems to predict where crime might happen is really about trying to contain and control Different kinds of people and communities and that has been historically kind of around racial discrimination and

Redlining and containment so you know I see these as kind of a newer generation of these kinds of technologies again you see them overrepresented and used to predict where Crime might take place and usually that's about particular types of crime as well the past information you should base your future choices in that exactly more black people are in jail

It's a different so if you have more arrests and Certain communities then you're gonna have algorithms that are gonna predict to go there to do more policing and more Watching so Jason for four reports that well many flood cameras are designed to track license plates a companies AI enabled condor cameras got these names they pick or just astonishing Track people where are these cameras deployed and how are they being used?

“Yeah, I mean, I think this is a really important thing because flock has spent a lot of the last month sort of saying no”

We just take static pictures of license plates. We're not tracking people which of course if you're tracking cars You are inherently tracking people But flock also has this entire software layer called flock OS that allows cops to pipe in footage from any of their surveillance cameras Whether that's a flock on camera or or another one and so they have these condor cameras which are PTZ cameras Which is pan tilt zoom meaning their video cameras hi-dath that can you know pan tilt and zoom in

They actually exposed some of these to the internet late last year and so I went and walked in front of some of them And bakers field California and Basically like these cameras

They zoomed in on me. I was always walking my dog across the street because they detect people they are on

Bike paths in suburban Atlanta. They're at street fairs. They are Not just on public roads, but also at pools at you know community centers on pedestrian walkways things like this And it all sort of pipes into this flock OS system that cops can monitor in real time It's all designed to kind of pair with their license plate product and that sort of thing right

So it's not just that is they want they want to look at everything essentially want constant surveillance. It's not truly So I just spoke with Speaking of that tech executive investor Chris Larson who I'm sure you all know he funded his surveillance and at work in San Francisco It's been credited with lower in crime in the city there. It was an actual problem He says he understands concerns about surveillance here is a clip

I totally get it. I think this is gonna be the issue of the day those because it's a trade-off always public safety

And privacy and Samson is really good on this right so they're not just doing surveillance and Looking everywhere and trying to see if somebody's doing something wrong. It's when you get a report of a Smashing grab into that or a strong arm robbery then a drone is gonna be sent over there

“That's what they do, but I get it you know people are still uncomfortable because it could change”

So at what point do you think the potential harms and abuses of surveillance tech outweigh the benefits Victoria and then Sophia I mean One one problem I have is the idea that these are infallible and accurate. They're not like I think there was a case with a flat camera Where a woman was thrown for 13 days in jail when she was innocent and she had receipts and they're like no I don't know this system Basically said you were it and so

This whole premise of that you're trading off your privacy for your security and your safety

Is based on the idea that these systems are infallible and accurate and it's always gonna catch the right person and that's just not true

And so you know, I just have a real problem with This trade off being so one to one and these tech guys is mind Sophia Yeah, I mean picking right up on what Victoria is saying just to take a deeper we actually know that when these Visual recognition systems are displayed to people of color they are less accurate in fact They are most accurate when white male faces are depicted and are captured and they have

the least efficacy on black women's faces and you can kind of go across that racial continuum to see the way in which In fact people have been wrongly incarcerated and we have a lot of research now on the lack of a Reliability of these kinds of cameras so you know this idea that we can scientifically somehow Solve these problems Through surveillance is really

on true I mean there are many reasons also why we have smash and grab in cities and why we have crime in cities that aren't about

“Because we don't have the perfect surveillance state and so I think that you know the question is really about”

The underlying causes the root causes Rather than making an incredible amount of money off of drones and Floc cameras using the pretext of crime to do it. Exactly. We should know that Floc told for a media that its products do not have facial recognition it is no facial recognition technology and development Atlanta where Floc is based is one of the most surveilled cities in America

But local news reporting suggests the number of crimes people consider soft is not Meaningfully increased despite an increase in the cameras that's according to data collected by the FBI Jason has to evaluate the efficacy of surveillance cameras based on that data because in some ways right look If some robberies happening and about drone can see it and the police could get their faster more efficiently Not the worst idea in the world. Yeah, I think that's the crux of the issue or sort of where I've gotten myself to at this point where

Surveil immigrants at the behest of ice they have been used to as we discussed Surveila woman who had a

Self-administer abortion, but then Floc will say well, it was used to to save this missing child. It was used to find this murder or that sort of thing

“I think what's really hard to do is to determine the actual causes of crime or a crime”

Increased or reduction. It's like we live in a very complex society with all sorts of socioeconomic factors That lead to a crime happening or not or a crime being solved or not and so Floc has sort of repeatedly picked anecdotes as well as like they paid for a study A few years ago that said that they were responsible for solving 10% of all crime in the United States Which is an absurd claim and also I spoke to the researchers who did that and said this is not what we actually said

So it's sort of like pick your scientist pick your anecdot that sort of thing. I think

For me the the big issue with this is that This technology network has been built out by a private company without the sort of robust public discussion that we're having right now And now that we're having the public discussion. I mean very like Everyone is talking about Floc. It's a huge topic on social media. It's huge at every city council meeting

“The companies and the police are saying what do you love criminals? Do you love crime like how could you want to take this down?”

And I think it's just something where there was not the initial sort of due diligence done before deploying this type of Technology very much like data centers NDAs just let's build them. Let's not tell you about these things It's a very it's a similar tactic by a lot of these companies. Let's get it out there and then by the time they're out there You know ask for forgiveness rather than Permission essentially

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Finance it's happening with Ripple for informational purposes only availability of products can vary and maybe Provide it by different ripple entities Let's take a step back and talk about how biases woven into the tech behind the cameras and throughout tech more broadly

You study Google search at the time and in a related research computer scientist Tim Nitt Gibbrew and Joy Bull and we need who have both of whom I've interviewed many times Found racial and gender biases in AI and facial recognition software Break it down for us how exactly are the stereotypes built into the AI training data to me It's the old computer thing garbage in garbage out but talk a little bit about that

Yeah, sure. I mean, I've been on the case since 2010

You know kind of first publishing about this in 2012 and I will say that back then

Even the word algorithms was not a part of our everyday Lexicon it just wasn't for every day people of the way it is now and we think of These technologies as being purely about math mathematical computation and the system's designers the software engineers themselves

“Still want to hold on to these ideas, but the truth is that if you take something like in the in the context of a search engine”

Trying to index the web and you use something like hyper linking as a way to signal what's important if this website is You know Linking or pointing to this website and enough of that Those kinds of things are happening then that means it must be credible and legitimate so it goes up in the page rank and You know, what you have is a massive network of

Computers and websites that can be Optimized by those who have the most money so in the case of the study that I did I found that when you did queries on Black women black girls latina girls Asian girls You know the majority of the representation misrepresentation of them was pornography

“So you couldn't get a fair representation for certain communities when you did search and part of that is because the porn industry”

How it was able to optimize those keywords more powerfully than any black women or girls or Asian-electina girls could do And so you have this kind of tension between Thinking about ad tech where industries that have a vested interest in trying to kind of surface what they want To the top of the pile is in play, but you also have designers who are not testing and not thinking about certain ideas and certain communities Certainly have a social nature and so they also

Design technologies that are Incredibly easy to manipulate and of course we've seen this even in the case of Back then when I was studying Again 15 years ago if you did keyword searches on Jews you would get

Holocaust denial sites anti-Semitic sites, you know right there in the first page in the first couple of hits

So the way in which these things happen is you have the the kind of convergence of ad tech people and actors Bad actors who can optimize content with the what we call the metadata the the description about The websites along with being able to pay it more to Google to optimize their content They're they're willing to pay to have more visibility. You have minoritized people who cannot compete with that And then you have an overlay of an idea that what's happening here is

Neutral and objective and you have this kind of as the cultural overlay where people relate to it right right right Right because most of those people have financial incentives important industry particularly but also other industries too I mean you know if you think about this Incredibly flawed and of course racial stereotypes and gender stereotypes, misogyny are also a huge part of the internet So if you are indexing the internet and you have no

Standard or value by which to evaluate let's say evidence-based research against a separate it That's you know a neo-nazzi thread or a misogynist thread or something in the manifest fair You actually put those things all up equal to each other in that level of engagement. Yeah. Yeah. I once had an argument with Larry Page about He said all news is the same I got New York Times. It's not the same as the National Guard. You do know that like it was it was a weird like well Just put them all up, but I'm like no because you're then waiting the national inquire

“It was it was an astonishing conversation. I never forget it”

Victoria you recently wrote about met as smart glass rollout again another product They had not thought about or done any anticipation of any possible consequences and said the company was playing

It's cards all wrong first explain the controversy on met as facial recognition software

Turnily called name tag. What are some of the the biggest privacy issues and how has the company responded? And I will know yesterday met a try to give me a pair of very bands. I have a pair, but I was like and no I don't want that anymore, but talk a little bit just a rebel understand the issues and you know the good

You know it wasn't a thing that met a put out there. There was a New York Times investigation that found that

“This internal document from meta where they were saying. Oh, we'll roll out this”

facial recognition feature At a time where privacy advocates are distracted by Political turmoil and so you know everyone latched on to that and it was like excuse me what like you clearly don't have great Intentions there and you know four or four has done great reporting about spotting these Metaglasses on customs and border patrol agents and so a lot of people are like oh

So you're telling me that the government could facially recognize me wearing these glasses meta kind of had some executives come out and be like no, no, it's meant to be a closed system on Instagram and you know It's based on your contacts you get to define who these people are That wasn't widely disseminated and then wired came out with their own investigation and they found that meta had silently Shipped the the code for this name tag feature to millions of devices out there and you know secretly walked it back after all of that

“And once the backlash was huge because you know no one wants to feel like they're walking down the street and an ordinary pair of meta glasses is”

Like identifying them a couple years ago There were these college students who modified a pair of meta glasses so that they could instantly dox people based on existing facial recognition database That are out there and you know, it's it's creepy. It's just creepy to have the ideas Especially if you're a woman that you're walking down to street and the pickup artists could be looking at you and finding out your name and your address pretending that they know you and

It can be quite scary especially also to label the lights that are supposed to meant the Disable that it's tape out so for for the longest time meta's privacy policy was don't be a jerk Also, we have this singular LED light that will signal to everyone that you're recording Well, this LED light can not only be tempered with in multiple ways both by software and physically by drilling and took to the light It's very easily washed out by bright sunlight. So you're outside you're walking it's daylight

“You're I have pictures on the verge.com where I have the light on and you really can't notice that it's there”

I've had many people and testing. I'll be like, can you see this privacy light and they're like, oh, you know It's really easily washed out where in bright sunlight or where indoors even no one's really noticing it a true story I was at a vanity fair Oscar party in Sergei Bryn walked in with Google glass And nobody would talk to him. This was many years ago. Maybe a decade ago when they were putting out Google glass and He came up to me and he goes, no one's talking to me. I wonder what I go. You fucking creeper like what do you think these are celebrities

They don't want to be you want to tape people. Well, I'm not doing it. I'm like, yeah, but how do they know like it was really It's sort of the mentality from the beginning that this is a good thing to be able to identify people. Yeah, that and it's just like there is a disconnect between what people know the limitations of the devices are versus what they can actually do online

You see a lot of people go. Oh, I don't want to be recorded 24/7. Well, the reality is that these glasses only lasted about 30 minutes of continuous recording and

That's if you've got them charged All the way up, but in the future and there has been reporting on this meta once these devices To be super sensing or Recording 24/7 in which case there's a lot of sensitive situations that yeah opens people up to Four or four media reported early the summer how police were using flock feature called free form to track people not just cars

Which they had claimed that was what they were doing again Floc has said it's probably still not have facial recognition, but Jason how does free form work and what are the characteristics People are search of or I mean you were walking your dog. Yeah, yeah, so that I mean this free form search does use the automated life Display reader systems so that again flocks as this just takes static images, but it's not just the static image of a license plate It's an image of a car and for a while they did roll out video as well

What free form searches is essentially Google for cops Victoria brought up earlier this woman who was arrested in Florida who Serve 13 days in prison What happened there was the cops search for a black SUV and so rather than actually having the license plate in question They typed in black SUV and her car was flagged by the system. She was near a site of a hidden run accident that killed three people the cops showed up at her house and arrested her on these you know manslaughter charges

Her car was not in any accident whatsoever She was not involved she just happened to be nearby this can be applied to Like searches for people so you could search Protests sign like someone holding a sign you can search for different types of bumper stickers you can search for dog For example, and so if there's a report of a dog bite or something like that a cop could search

Any dog that passed by one of these flock cameras another thing that flock likes to bring up is that these cameras are not always recording

That that's one of the things with this company is that the technology started off being

“Maybe not so advanced, but they've been adding features left and right”

They are experimenting all the time and once a City is sort of locked into a contract. It's like they're getting all these upgrades and cops are

Experimensing with something. Yeah, it's become like the first thing that cops do is they go to flock

Anytime there's a report of a crime and they're like I'm gonna type it into the system and see what comes up Yeah, it makes their life easier in that regard that's policing and more surveillance Every episode we get a question from an outside expert here is yours. Hi everyone. I am Nicole Polara the cyber security journalist and author of This is how they tell me the world ends about the cyber weapons arms race I have covered everything from the snowdund files to the recent Chinese cyber attacks on our critical infrastructure and more recently

I've been tracking North Korean efforts to secure remote IT work at US companies on my podcast to catch a thief. I am also actually a flock customer our streets set up Flock safety cameras after we were broken into But perhaps more than anyone in the neighborhood. I'm also a cutely aware that we are creating an ambient surveillance network where the people getting caught in these dry nets never opted in and

Really never have a way to meaningfully opt out So the big question I would ask of each of you is what information should companies simply never

Be allowed to collect in the first place and what is this single most important rule you would put in place

Before this infrastructure becomes impossible to unwind Thank you so much Sophia you go first and Victoria and in Jason. You know, this is a interesting question because I also can personally relate to this having had a vandalism at my home and how would we respond and you know our choice was to have a closed system where we could

Know what was happening around us, but that did not feed to law enforcement and did not trigger The cops coming and let's say arresting my teenage son falsely

“So I think when one implements a surveillance tack the for their own personal safety that does not mean”

That they're entitled to surveil the entire neighborhood or everyone around them and engineer and in trap everyone into that You know, I think I thought that was the more ethical personal choice for our family and I think these are the kinds of things that also Protect my neighbors ultimately It's not so much the what is the Message from the companies. I think it's what is the message that we

Carry and what are the values we carry in our neighborhoods in our communities, you know with our neighbors

we have an incredible community

List serve and we do a lot of things to try to just look out for each other as people and I think outsourcing that to you the tech isn't particularly beneficial not to the degree that it creates, you know other opportunities as Victoria was talking about like having a conversation About what we see and how we can help each other right and what would be the single most part really would put in place

“I think these systems should be illegal until we have done the proper vetting have the proper public discourse”

And we have more democratic participation in whether they exist in our lives at all at all Victoria So a lot of the surveillance tech idea with is kind of on a personal level. It's wearables. It's yeah I'm gonna get to that next one thing that I've been grappling with recently is the idea of my personal Privacy and data is my personal privacy kind of similar to what Sophia was saying I don't think that anyone should ever be put in the position to be the steward of someone else's privacy

Given these devices and so that's the one thing that you you consent is like The number one thing in my mind at this point in time and the idea that I am now burdened with your privacy If we just happen to be sharing a physical space is is a heavy burden and it's really kind of turned me off the Supposed convenience or benefits of these devices the the number one rule. I think is that we cannot leave it to private companies to make these decisions We do need regulators and we do need places to weigh in and chime in because

What happens when you have a pair of glasses that is your primary seeing device and you go into a court And the court is like well, we've banned it and you're left without a seeing device that is vital to you navigating the world Are you then obligated as an individual to carry two backup seeing devices on you at all times when glasses cost a bajillion dollars And the in the U.S. especially if you're visually impaired So it's like we need to be having like Sophia said a very public discourse and one with legislators and yeah

We cannot leave it to these private companies to decide so and I think it's a lot of well that

Veterans who can't see or blind people can't see and things like that life changing for them but can those people too deserve privacy those people too deserve a higher standard so I have a little bit of an issue with people using this as using accessibility as a shield

“Jason. Yeah, I mean, I think facial recognition should be a nonstarter, but I think”

More broadly than that like automated enforcement using these technologies where right now the the big difference is that we used to have human being Watching surveillance footage getting it after the fact that's sort of thing now you have an AI watching this footage at all all times And you have the idea work that is a lot larger than it's ever been and I think that we really risk criminalizing a lot of Like frivolous behaviors like I think that we're we're marching towards a place where it is very difficult to exist in public without

running a foul of some Local ordinance or yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's like the elicence goal. It is I know exactly We were referring to and that I mean that's the goal that's some of these people imagine This is for people that don't know Larry else and said it's good to have them because then people behave exactly

And I said the person who never behaves. I think we are starting to see

Surveillance systems affecting behavior, especially with meta glass and things like that like guy and my softball team More than the other day. I didn't know he was wearing them. He had a home run and he turned them on and I was like, oh my god I'm being recorded. I didn't even know and you sort of don't know how to react in that moment

“It's bad enough with cell phones, but you can see them coming in the other ways and then I think that there should be a warrant requirement”

And I think that you know a lot of cops in the company say that this will make it the technology not Viable, but you know there's been studies done that the average warrant takes something like three minutes to process Like this can be a very streamlined process, but I do think that adding that little bit of friction Will prevent a lot of abuse it appears to be a nonstarter for flock and companies like it something that they don't want to talk about And it's something that they fall very you know heavily against they say please regulate us, but then you say, okay, warrant requirement and they shut down

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This code is valid on products only these are compounded products not subject to FDA approval Hey there, it's super you know the drill another week another new episode of birds I view This week I'm thrilled to be joined by Australia's most notable women's basketball player and my former Seattle storm teammate Lauren Jackson She talks about the pros and cons of going pro at

International tournaments and the WMBA plus ensues view I answer your questions about the ucon documentary that came out

Make sure to check out bird's eye view on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts Let's shift to the consumer angle Victoria just referenced about wearable tech by some estimates nearly half of Americans own a wearable device and a recent report from the electronic frontier foundation found that most wearables lack basic Transparency reports and key privacy features because you argue that after smart phone quote tech companies have decided they should live on and eventually in our bodies

“So is more willable and implantable tech the captures your biometric data and an inevitability and how is personal data?”

It's clicked on these devices use just for myself. I don't wear the ordering anymore. I've shifted to a regular watch Not a digital watch the phone is probably the one thing that is with me all the time

So talk about this briefly. So basically you know these devices are constantly like sampling your biometrics like a smart watch for example

It's constantly measuring your heart rate It's measuring your movements and it all gets fed into algorithms that are proprietary and are Different depending on what company you're using and they'll use that and feed it into an AI Increasingly now that gives you personalized insights and the idea is that eventually you'll get personalized medicine And this is kind of an interesting concept sort of but it requires so much data

And these companies are getting increasingly invasive So they're increasingly tying up with CGMs which are continuous glucose monitors because metabolism is a thing that they want to get into

“They want to track your hormones and so they're asking you to pee into a cup and”

Use your pee data in some way they want to measure your sweat through your feet for a Scale and all of these things are supposed to create a picture of you So you have better health data that's the benefit that they give to you, but it's also just like well They want all that information so they can serve you targeted at they want all that information so that They can serve their advertisers in some ways and it's similar to how the

Flot camera is saying like crime is something that will solve and we'll give you all this convenience. It's going to save your life So it's a pretty compelling Thing but you know as we're seeing they're not just health trackers anymore They're going to be ambient listening devices that are just on your body all the time and this new Apple Yes, the the audio intelligence announcement

Which is just you know, it's making people feel a certain way because it's one thing to save your life If you're in a car crash or if you fall down it's another one. It's just like oh is your Apple watch this thing to me at all times and right What is the transcript that's being Generated and you know Apple has released a white paper Some support documents that said there's no audio

That's being saved. There's no playback. There's attribution stripped from all of these high-level summaries There's no transcript and it seems like they're trying to preemptively address some of the privacy concerns there, but It's also just like it changes the behavior of people now and these are the people who just change like Ontario to like America Just pointing that out Ridiculous people they are

Appled by the way just unveiled. It's new AI watch that always listening feature that takes notes of a whereas

Compensation suit a day turn it off everybody Just turn it off. There's no need for you to know that it's at least opt in so it's not on by default So if you don't ever want it if it was if you don't have one it would be on by default So go Apple good for you Apple the New York Times recently reported that Nanette and other startups offering smart baby Monter's systems

Tending benefits like optimized nap predictions according in times reporting the wearable's market is approaching a hundred billion dollars a huge potential on the baby tech sector Sophia you worked in tech and advertising for entering academia Talk about the rise of baby tech and what's the risk benefit analysis that parents you consider for a hooking up a new born with a smart mother I have four kids. I have used listening monitors on them But increasingly as I had more children less and less monitoring happened over time and

Certainly there's been a lot of reports of people hacking into it, et cetera, et cetera These sort of nightmare stories talk a little bit about newborn baby tech

“Yeah, I mean so much of this wearable tech is snake oil and I think that's one of the things that people really don't”

Understand I mean even in a hospital, you know, we remember during COVID that the oxometer Can we actually accurately read the levels of oxygen among African Americans or more melanated people so The science is faulty on a lot of the premises as Victoria is getting at so imagine putting the faulty science on a newborn baby

And the kind of scientific basis of how research is done in medicine. It's mostly white men

So the the entire like premise here that we somehow are gonna know more and be more effective in in a medical intervention Context is is patently false and we know this to me that you know when you think about babies and talk about people who can't consent To being in trapped into these systems and of course many many parents over the last decade as they've been quitting Facebook have also been taking their children off the internet For very important reasons because your children shouldn't be on the internet their faces shouldn't be on the internet

Not just for the way in which their images are used for child sexual exploitation

“Materials and child pornography, but I think you know babies like crime like the things we're talking about health”

are such an emotional trigger or for families people want to protect their babies They want to believe that they're giving their children the very best in that what a Conditious kind of craving marketing play to use. I mean, that is really they are the objects of Manipulation for parents and people who are caretakers of children Both of you cannot optimize naps. Sorry. You can't and also babies aren't doing many crimes. I've noticed

Baby's out of no crime and babies and if they are we'll take care of that one baby I'm very clever baby. The only time I've used technology monitoring and it's on the opposite end For elderly people my mother was falling a lot and a lot of fall camera in the thing because it was hard You know because she fell so much and so in that case I found it useful I made certain they had an on-off switch for it wearable technology can help empower people can and devices like Apple Watch can help doctors

The patient's tech conditions like are atrial ficture relation. I used to go on. I had a stroke. It was very helpful But that utility depends on collecting again and increasing amount of detail data Victoria and then Jason how should we will weigh those benefits against the privacy risks and where should the line be drawn? That these devices collect retain and share and is any company doing it right first Victoria and Jason? That's a lot of stuff. But you know, I will say that one thing that we do at the verge of our reviews

We have an agreed to continue section at the end of each review and we talk about the terms and conditions

You're agreeing to and I always say that if you're very sensitive to your private health data

You do not want to wearable device. I say this as the wearable lady because it's not just You know, you're device. You buy it. That's one set of terms and conditions on privacy policies

“You have to connect it to your phone. That's a separate set of privacy terms and conditions and then you know all of these things”

They're saying oh connect to Strava connect to these other third party things those have their own separate Terms and conditions. So when you're connecting through these API's you are agreeing to that third parties Possibly less rigorous privacy terms and standards. So there's no way to really stop and contain the privacy of your health data HIPAA exists, but it's Hopefully inadequate and has been outdated for wearable technology since its inception

So, you know, you can't really rely on those things and what I generally tell people is that these devices are Constantly bombarding you with more metrics more things to become anxious about and what you really have to do is come in with a very strong goal If you haven't health issue that again if you have had a stroke if you have had a heart condition I Continually test CGMs because I have messed up metabolism and I'm trying not to have full-blown diabetes even though it's in my family history

So there's like a certain terms of engagement that I have set for myself and you know, I've talked with my own editors about what level of Evasive technology I am willing to test for myself and what I will not test because an increasing number of these companies want my blood and I have to sit with that About like all the blood draws that they want to take for me and by that extension consumers these are very serious

“Things that these companies want to learn from you. So it's like do you have a condition that needs to be monitored?”

Are you chronically ill for those people wearables can be very empowering? It can help them regulate their day and their energy. There are specific wearables that are out there to help them with that If you are someone who is hard of hearing or Bovision there are certain trade-offs there that will make your life More autonomous more independent and that's great for you

But if you are an average person sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is not engage with these devices It's to listen to your own body and

You know, I always say wearables are only met to monitor long-term trends

You've had a good night's worth asleep. You better generally do if you're healthy in the series

I did for CNN. I always talked to Zika manual and we were talking about the ordering and he goes you know when you don't sleep well

You don't need it to tell you that you didn't sleep well, which is interesting. So Jason go ahead. Yeah I mean, I was just gonna say like there's a reason why

“People use these things, which is they're very convenient and I think that they almost kind of like”

Insidiously enter your life where you get them for one reason and then you know new features are added that sort of thing I think often about TSA pre and clear and all these things that we do at the airport to save a few minutes like or to not have to take our wallet out like that sort of thing And I think Every person needs to sort of make their calculation like what they are comfortable with and what they are not comfortable with

I think that one of the things that I try to do in my work is focus on how we can push back for better

Regulation of these technologies and I think Victoria raise a super important point that every surveillance device or whether it's a wearable Whether it's you know you're buying a brain camera at these sorts of things They connect to other systems and I think that once you don't have any idea where your data is flowing That's when I started personally get very uncomfortable with it and you ask about companies that you trust I mean, I think that they don't have a perfect track record, but I think Apple at least nods to

Privacy a lot and they do a lot of things like on-device things like this like you can control where the data is going I think unless they get your device it's in there exactly and that that's the other thing is like

“I mean the only way to be absolutely safe is to like opt out of society entirely and I think that that is”

Not feasible for most people. I think also with something like a brain camera It's like maybe your family is okay with you having your own camera, but is the people who deliver packages to your house Is the gardener is you know, you're sort of opting other people into these egos to somes and I think people need to Consider that let's end by looking at the shift around public attitudes I have taken all these things off my house, which is interesting because I don't have an hour or any more

I'm moving to analog watches again. I still of course have the phone apps and products routinely Encourage users to share a more personal information exchange for better experience your improved product There's a sense that you're contributing to make this any better by sharing your data They ask you that all the time. Would you like to share to help us improve our systems? Sophia, what are their arguments do companies use to persuade us to surrender our data?

“And how valid are those arguments everyone has gotten that pop-up for example?”

Yeah, I mean I think that the more that these technologies are embedded into our Public institutions and to our jobs, you know the into kind of authority conferring Legitimizing spaces the more people feel they cannot resist or they feel that someone has vetted these things for them or They're their livelihood is dependent upon them So I think that's one of the challenges is the the public is for example

Deeply suspicious of generative AI and large language models and yet when they go to work, especially the more they're working in kind of like white-collar jobs They're being forced to use these kinds of things and so I think the companies have been smart To try to really triple down on enterprise level engagement and of course We have things like which we haven't even talked about surge pricing and predictive pricing and things that happen You know, now you're in the grocery store and you're paying more than I'm paying more than Victoria's paying

You know for the same bag of carrots like all of these kinds of things I think are Thankfully the verge and four or four media I have been powerfully covering and helping us understand investigative journalists understand what the stakes are But the companies are really gamifying You know, they're either going through our jobs or they're kind of gamifying making these things seem fun and interesting and like you don't want to be left behind

I mean, we see these ads all over L.A. for friend dot com, you know the friend necklace that Oh, okay, we could just do a show on friend. I mean from how so you know the wearable necklace that tracks every single thing You do and all your conversations and somehow that's cute and comments on your life So I think you know, we just have to get smarter and smarter about this are instincts in the public that these things are Not what we want are the right instincts and I would just say that

People have ways to resist one of the most powerful things that people can do

If you have a pension or you have a 401k or you have any way to Direct your money out of surveillance tech that is something you can and should do We're doing that as professors right now in the UC. We have a massive campaign going to take our Pension money out of surveillance tech. We there should be pressure on CalPERS and CalCERS and all the different Pension funds because that's actually where they these companies get the money

To make the terrible things that are either going to put us out of work or make our lives more difficult

It and speaking back to and cutting off the flow of capital into these dumb ideas I would also stress that they're saying they're give you give or your data it'll be better. It's their business They can figure out a different way than stealing from you Last question for all of you the electronic front tier foundation recently released a two-part guide to online safety and doxing Which was ways to reduce your overall footprint along with steps to take if you're in the midst of being dox

Ultimately a lot of people don't feel in control

They're person in a data a lot of it. You can't opt out of unless you want to just live out in the woods and grow your own vegetables Which maybe you might want to do soon about the vegetable part But it will take to convince people that their actions matter when it comes to protecting their Privacy because they'd in fact they do and I've said that this popular backlash against surveillance check and data centers is a proxy for anger toward tech oligarchs billionaires AI a number of things

Do you think we're reaching a moment when backlash can lead to actual systemic change or political movement and Changing our relationship with tech and because consumers I doubted I sort of go more with different European regulators one of whom told me We're trading convenience for control of our lives

“So I'd love each of you to sort of reflect in a big picture. Do you think there is a movement because I feel it with my older sons?”

They are veering away from this stuff in a way that is social media Tracking and things like that much more so than people that are older them But do you feel like it is one of those moments where we want to renegotiate our relationship with tech Jason Victoria and then Sophia you can finish and have a last word. I absolutely do you think that there is a movement there like you identified

I started becoming a tech journalist right before the Edward son revelations of 2013 and That was a big moment. I mean, there were not huge changes in privacy then but it was very top of mine

But I've been covering surveillance in privacy ever since then and I've always looked at it as this very niche thing that

You know a lot of people care about very deeply But that the masses either don't understand or don't get out of bed to talk about and with this flock and the AI data center backlash I mean, I log on to Instagram and the videos I'm seeing there people talking about it one a lot of them are very informed Like getting into the nitty gritty and two a lot of them don't have 10,000 views

They have 10 million views and I mean that's a difficult way to assess Popularity, but I do think you are seeing people show up at city council meetings. You're seeing city councils cancel these contracts and you're also seeing attempts by The people who are opposing flock to make this a more universal discussion about surveillance technologies in general And so you know that they're powerful interests sort of on the other side

Like there's a lot of money on the line for these companies like AI companies, especially to have us use this technology into to have

You know data center proliferated and all that sort of thing, but I do think that there is A very concerted backlash right now, and I do think that Politicians are starting to listen whether that leads to meaningful change or whether it leads to You know like packaging it up around the edges and getting shoved down our throats anyways

“I think that kind of remains to be seen, but I've feeling a bit more optimistic than I have in quite some time just because of the”

Amount of energy that that we're seeing right now pictorial. Yeah, I just want to bring up the example of Google glass The original version and the current backlash that we're seeing with meta glasses the public absolutely has the say and whether these things proliferate Because what happened with the Google glass people were ripping them off each other's faces and then you don't want to get into a situation where you're in danger You know, I see this incredibly violent language that my readers and people online say with these

Perfect glasses, where it's like, oh, gonna rip them off each other's faces and I'm like don't do that That could be not so great for you, but at the same time, you know, my coworker Mia Sotto wrote a story about how people are harassing Retail workers with these glasses and one thing that I found super encouraging was the retail worker was so smart and he said meta stop recording So people can do things to make these devices on attractive and that will force Companies to either adopt a less evil way of implementing that we've seen that with Apple with these new audio intelligence features with their saying

So it's not gonna do this. It's not gonna do that. We're trying to make it attractive in a more private way because there is this public backlash So yes, like I do have hope and you're certainly not gonna do it on their own trust They're not going to do it on their own so people do have to say very loudly We don't like this do better So I do have hope there because we killed smart glasses once. This is very fragile

I'm still a skeptic. I'm not I'm not it's not inevitable that smart glasses have to be a thing

“So do you know where the video will go in your air punts?”

That's where it's going I'm just telling you That's why I and that's where it's headed Sophia you get the last word. Well, I got to say I've been in this

2010 and 2012

“So I'm I'm extremely hopeful. In fact, what I see is”

Unions are starting to come to the table and they're bargaining over the use of AI and the job that is

Go go harder do more on that We are seeing all over Europe in particular a complete divestment from US big tech I mean nation states are talking about we need to get our government and our citizens off of Microsoft So these are very big global shifts and in fact, there's a whole new Renaissance for Linux

If you can believe it or people having the server at home keeping things local

Figuring out how to make mesh networks We see new kind of Bluetooth networking just very interesting kinds of what we might think of as French now but moving toward more and more toward the mainstream because people do love tech But they want to do it in ways that are not So consequential and of course the more that people learn about Palantir and what it means to have these kinds of companies as the

Infrastructural backbone of where all this data converges to create digital profiles that determine How you can move. I mean social credit people worry about what China's doing

“We should be worried about what the United States is doing so I think that these are much more mainstream”

Conversations than they were a decade ago and I'm grateful that we're able to have these conversations this conversation will reach a lot of people And there are practical ways again that people can move their money out of surveillance tech They can bargain over those things on their job. They can confront the school boards and the schools where their children go and get this Productive AI out of the lives that are kind of where these technologies will over determine what is possible for us and for our futures

Yeah, I do believe there is for the first time. I agree with all of you that there is suddenly very a lot of anger

It's a lot of reasons but it's converging and it would be really nice if our regulators would listen to people

“Which they don't do most of the time instead of get bought and paid for by these companies?”

Anyway, I really appreciate it's really important to understand Surveillance and and and and to have a good attitude towards it in some cases It can be helpful in most cases. It is helpful only to these tech companies and I really appreciate your continued work all of you Thanks for having me Today's show was produced by the shot Kerwa Michelle Aloy Catherine Milsop, Meghan Bernie and Madeline LaPlante Dubie

Special thanks to Lisa Soap, Jim Mackel, Manolo, Marino and Annika Robbins Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kuan and our theme music is by Tracodemics If you're already following the show, we won't have to follow you. If not, your creeper glasses won't save you from Silicon Valley's Surveillance Penopicon. Go wherever you listen to podcasts search for on with Kerwa Swisher and hit follow Thanks for listening to on with Kerwa Swisher from podium media New York magazine the Vox media podcast network and us will be back on Thursday with more