Will a new law change the internet forever?

- Simple, but perhaps controversial truth,

“and that is, wired headphones are better.”

- Once you've built an ID, facial recognition, surveillance state, it's really hard to roll that back. - Hello and welcome to the interface. The show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world on Thomas Droomain.

- I'm Karen Howe. - And I'm Nicky Wolf. - Today on the interface, the proposed new law that could end the internet as we know it.

- The hidden human labor that's watching you. - And our wired headphones actually better than Bluetooth.

- So we wanted to first start today

with a bit of a somber update on the news that we were talking about last week where we mentioned that the Wall Street Journal had reported that anthropics AI tool Claude had been used in the military operation to bomb Iran.

And there's since been more reporting that has come out, including from the Washington Post, that has mentioned that Claude was specifically used to analyze a lot of intelligence data and then identify roughly 1,000 bomb targets.

One of the places that ended up being bombed was a school and in fact, it was bombed twice. So when it was first bombed a bunch of first responders and parents then came to the school to try and rescue people and then it was bombed again.

So there were significant civilian casualties,

many of them under 12 years old. And there is some legitimate speculation now from observers about whether or not this school was identified as a bomb target by Claude because one of the things, as you might remember,

if you watched last week's episode, is that large language models are highly inaccurate and they're very ill-equipped to be integrated into highly sensitive contexts, a certainly life and death situations.

And futurism, publication, actually try to pose this question to the Pentagon whether or not the school was in fact identified as a bomb target by the air model and they declined to share any further information.

- It's all just a grim story all round. - And it is very good.

“With that, I think we have a really good show for you today.”

We're going to talk about some, hopefully more fun topics. So-- - And horrible stuff, it's a little less horrible. (laughing) It's not that bad. - It's not that bad.

But it's bad. - So Nikki, why don't you take it away? - All right, so the way into the story is a little complicated because of the way Congress works, but a set of laws has progressed through Congress

to the next stage of voting. The main one is called the Kids Act, KIDS Congress likes to use these QC little acronyms for all of this stuff.

Basically what these pieces of legislation do

is mandate, age, gatekeeping for much of the internet. So on anything judged to have adult content will need age verification now. That's not. You may be used to clicking, I'm over 18,

when you go to a site like Reddit or corn sites or anything like that. What this will mean is that you will now have to upload a picture of your government issued identification card. And this is really split public opinions

straight down the middle because on the one hand, yes, I know arguably we want to protect children from seeing things that might be inappropriate for them. There's all kinds of things online that you could make an argument for online gatekeeping.

I think online gambling is one that I think we need some kind of protections from. On the other hand, one that gives the government massive database of people's identification and we live in an age where there's a lot of reasons

especially in the US that you might not want. The government to have that kind of information about you or private companies to have that information about you. So there's huge privacy concerns and huge surveillance concerns. And also what this does effectively

is change the internet in a really meaningful way from a place where fundamentally visit places anonymously to a system of gated communities where your identification follows you around everywhere you go. There's some important nuance here, right?

So this is question of age verification. If you live in half of US states or in the UK, for example, there are these laws that have been passed that on porn sites in particular,

“you have to verify your age beyond a shadow of a doubt,”

like with either some kind of facial recognition scan

like you're saying.

“In the United States it's more complicated than that.”

The Supreme Court ruled on this with laws

about porn sites that that's okay. But for the rest of the internet, it's not clear that this is constitutional. So these laws like the kids act are not outright saying that you have to do age verification.

They're just saying if you're not very, very sure that there aren't kids you're gonna get in enormous trouble. And then like it's the sideways in that then you might have to do it. There's a balance here where trying to protect kids, but then at what cost to like your comfort using the internet.

- I feel like we should talk a little bit about like play out what it looked like for people's day-to-day lives to access information with this law in place. Because this was something that I didn't fully understand that both of you were trying to explain to me.

- So the worst case scenario is a government can designate anything as unsafe.

And then that would mandate identifying anyone who goes

onto it. So for example, WikiLeaks, or for example, the abstine files or the New York Times with BBC. - Right, access to information about abortion provisions in southern states where abortion is under assault by the state governments could easily fall into this.

It could be almost everything. It provides the infrastructure for a very restrictive and very surveillance state way of operating the internet. - Right now, you're constantly being monitored to everyone knows that.

But what if there was this even more direct tie to like your real world identity? How might that affect not just the things that you choose to access, but the things that you choose to say on the internet, the real concern here, right?

This is all about at this point social media. Do we why kids using social media under what circumstances? So like, and I think politicians are thinking like social media is an app. But it's also just a vector for speech

and expression and communication and information. And by putting up this barrier where it's like,

“you need to tie your real world identity”

to what you're doing. That might change what you're comfortable doing online. - There's a lot of knock on effect here that certainly this kind of legislation does not prepare for.

And that's even before you get to the problem that there is no good technological way of doing this, right? - Everywhere it's been tried has been absolute chaos. There was a massive data breach at Discord last September. - Which is like a gaming communicate,

like it's like a chat app for gamers. 70,000 people's identification was leaked. - And this was like their government ID, wow. - I think looking to porn is a really interesting way to think about what's gonna happen here

because this is a trueism of technology that whatever the future of tech is, it happens in porn first because like that's where the biggest economic engine is in the world. - That's the internet is made.

- Right, porn is always the canary in the coal mine. - Exactly.

“- Anything in terms of privacy and surveillance”

and technology, it always happens in porn first.

- Everyone can agree that we don't want children accessing pornography, right? Like if you talk to porn hub and the company that owns porn hub was called ALO, I had interviewed them last year for a story on this subject.

They said, "We're on board. "We don't want kids on our website." The problem here like you're saying, Nicky, is these laws make it more difficult to access these mainstream porn companies

that are doing more to moderate the content on their platform. So this attempt to make children more safe just pushes them to more dangerous places. It seems like we're rushing ahead

with this like not particularly thoughtful solution to a problem that does have consequences that are very, very clear. - This new legislation updates, another piece of legislation

which has been going through called Cosa, the Kids Online Safety Act. This new legislation actually removes a clause from that called the duty of care clause, which would affect the big social media companies

and was designed to regulate their addictive structural practices that we've talked about on the previous episode, this new legislation actually removes a safety clause for that. - Do we know who, which of the tech companies

has been doing the lobbying? - Yeah, this is a really interesting question that has kind of split the tech industry into different parts. So meta the company that runs Facebook

and Instagram at WhatsApp, they're all in onage verification, but what they want is they want the operating systems to handle it. - They should have to check your ID

because that way it's like the responsibility

- What would it look like for the operating systems

of your devices to be doing this? Like is that supposed to be better? - That's a great question. So in the UK right now, there's a law that says essentially,

if you're like sufficiently large online platform,

“then you need to be doing age verification”

to keep kids off of content that they shouldn't be accessing. And this has a long way hit companies like Spotify, Wikipedia, like, you know, was freaking out about this because Wikipedia was gonna have to start checking people's ID.

So it's like where does the verification happen? Does it happen when you get to the website that you're on? Which is how the proposals were rolled out initially? - A lot of people think that's a huge problem

because now the chilling effect on speech happens immediately.

You get to the site, you're there, and like, oh my god, this particular site is gonna get information about what I'm doing here. The alternative that has been proposed is called device-based verification.

Where what that would look like, there's a couple of different ways you could do this, where it's like one time your iPhone or your laptop or your Android phone or whatever it is, it verifies your age, one way or another.

And then as you Korean around the internet, you download an app, whatever it is, the app or the website can ask your device like, hey, is this person over 18? And people like that a little bit better

because there's less potential exposure like in terms of who's getting your data, in terms of like, you know, the number of places where there could be a security breach. But everyone I've talked to about this

says that that's not a good plan either. And again, there's still this concern about chilling effects on free speech. When there is a really easy alternative to this, something we already have, which is parental controls.

Parents can go set this up and they can step in and decide what they're comfortable with their kids doing online instead of the government doing it. It's kind of interesting that you mentioned parental controls

because a few years ago I did a story about parents who like helicopter parents in the digital age who have become very obsessed with using parental controls to monitor their children. And I hear what you're saying

that it does feel like at least a better solution than ubiquitous everyone gets the same rules. But there is something to be said about how parental controls is also not the perfect solution. Like I was talking with LGBT Huitines

who were saying that having parents who do not support the fact that they are gay and then using parental controls to surveillance control their access to health information was in and of itself a traumatic experience growing up.

So it's a more fundamental question than actually just technology itself in a way of like this has been a perennial problem in society if like who do we trust to take care of our children? - That is exactly it.

In Kansas, they passed an age verification law about porn sites. And the question is what counts as pornography? And if you read the text of this law, it like lays out every possible sex act you could imagine.

And then in the middle they also say

“that you have to do age verification for acts of homosexuality.”

Right? So we cover every kind of possible sex and then specifically we're like end gay stuff too. And Marsha Blackburn, the senator who is one of the main proponents of this law, Kosa, the kids online safety act.

She has openly said that one of the goals of the law is they will limit dangerous information about the transgender movement. - And it exactly that same time, Kansas has passed the law of saying that trans people must change their ideas

to the sex assigned at birth. - Right. - And then all the driver's choices were invalidated like overnight in no warning, right? - Yeah.

What we're talking about here, if these laws go through you know, unchanged is a very different internet than the one that we all grew up on. Would you rather that these kinds of laws, these kinds of protections had been in place

when you were growing up,

“like do you think it'd be a healthier and more adjusted person?”

- Precisely. I mean, we grew up in suddenly I grew up in the age of a,

basically completely free internet.

It was an absolute free for all. - Right. - The internet had a sense of freedom and fun and hope. Now, maybe that was naive, but it seems to me that the damage that's been done

to the internet has been done by the corporatization of it. It's been done by companies like matter, making their platforms. So neurologically addictive, occasionally

doesn't come close to the kind of harm that we're talking about. - I guess the question for you guys is, we know that age verification has all these potential consequences.

We know that parental controls have their own flaws. Would it be better to rush ahead with this stuff before we'd answer these questions because we're so concerned about protecting children or would it be better to do nothing?

'Cause I'm really not sure.

- It's basically like, are we okay with the current status quo,

I guess? - Yeah. - And maybe the question then is like, what are the harms that we're seeing currently that are not being addressed?

- And they're very nebulous, right? This is not a law proposed because of anything suddenly that has come up and he's suddenly movement,

“but I think the problem with putting in a bad law”

and a bad structure of laws is that that infrastructure is then there, once you built an ID, facial recognition, surveillance state, it's really hard to roll that back. - Well, if this story didn't get you really concerned

about your privacy, then my story definitely will. There was a recent investigation that was done by two Swedish newspapers, SVD and GP, as well as a freelancer in Kenya, Napa Noi, Leipapa. And this is the craziest investigation

because they basically discovered

that if you are a meta-raven's user, people are watching the recordings that you are making and there is no way for you to opt out. - These are smart glasses, right? We're talking about glasses with a little camera,

a little computer, you can call it stuff you see, one of the immediate problems with them came up with people recording people in public without that consent.

“- But also, people were recording themselves,”

either intentionally or unintentionally, doing very intimate acts at home, like sitting on the toilet, having sex. In one case, the investigation found that a man put his meta-raven's on the bedside table

and then left the room, but they were still recording, unclear whether he realized that or not, then what appeared to be his wife walked into the room, definitely unaware that the ribbons are recording and started getting undressed.

And so all of this footage is gathered up by Meera. And it turns out that some of it ends up getting sent

to a third party contractor in Kenya called Sama.

And the investigation interviewed over 30 Sama contractors, as well as former meta-employees in the U.S., who then revealed that there is this huge supply chain of data, intimate videos being sent to these people for review.

And your sex video can end up in an office in Kenya, people have been outraged by this. And this investigation triggered a pro by a UK watchdog and now a class action lawsuit in the U.S. So this is kind of like a crazy situation

because, I mean, well, I mean, obviously, it's like, really, this is like, this is partly a crazy situation because of the way that meta-avertizes as glasses. So it has this page dedicated to privacy of their meta-raven's products.

And at the top of this page, it says in big bold letters, designed for privacy controlled by you. Oh, good. Oh, yeah. And it is--

What are we talking about? And then these are those things. That every word in that sentence is a lie. Yeah, so this is what like Meta's defense has been in response to this investigation is, oh, but in our AI terms of service,

which is a totally different page. There's this tiny little print that says, we may sometimes conduct review of the things that you put into Meta-a-a. I sometimes that will be automated review

and sometimes that will be done by humans. And then in other little tiny print, it's like, maybe don't share sensitive data that you don't want shared to us. Mm-hmm.

Well, I think the good news here is that almost everyone reads all the privacy policies so you'd probably-- One hundred percent. Right.

Well, Karen, this is one of my favorite parts of your book. This is something that you've investigated specifically. And there's a whole other interesting thing here. Can you remind us why are there people

who don't work in these companies in other countries

“who are viewing all of this content in the first place?”

Yes, I've been so obsessed with this topic. I've been reporting on this for almost eight years. And basically, the entire internet is built

The reason why people in the global north

get a clean social media experience

“is because once again, there are people in the back end”

that are reviewing all of this grotesque content to take it offline. And the workers themselves consider this to be a career. It's not like, oftentimes when people talk about this work, they really minimize it as its menial labor.

It's, you know, it's drudgery. But it's like, it's really hard. And these workers, you know, they take pride in the fact that they are keeping the internet safe for people. There's also people that review and do data annotation.

So the reviewing is sort of similar to what we're seeing with this meta-ray bands. Data annotation is this function where in order to even train AI systems, there are people that are literally teaching the AI model

every possible thing that it needs to know. So the fact that chat, CBT can chat is because there's literally tens or hundreds of thousands of people around the world that are typing into OpenAI's large language model

and showing it, this is the correct answer. This is not so great answer. And then there's my all-time favorite category

“of human labor is artificial artificial intelligence, right?”

Which we'll definitely get to at some point in a later episode. But some fights to say, you think that self-driving cars

are always just driving autonomously.

But oh no, there's actually a team in the Philippines that sometimes takes over and is remotely driving. Literally everything that you possibly use probably has hidden human labor behind it. Like there was a story a few years back

about how Amazon Alexa was also sending audio clips of people's intimate conversations to third party contractors as well. There was another story about how Rumba after they attached cameras to their vacuum cleaners.

They would also film people on the toilet as well and film people doing other types of intimate acts. And then they were sending it to a third party contractor called ScaleAi. And then the workers were literally taking the Rumba photos

that people did not even know were being recorded of them and posting them on Facebook in these Facebook groups to talk with each other about like, oh, like how am I supposed to address like labeling this thing or how am I supposed to review this thing?

So then people's potty photos were literally going onto Facebook and then traveling to then public spaces because then they would leak from the Facebook group.

“- I think it's fair to say that if you have a device”

in your house or you're using an app or you've got a thing and it's like, got a system that continually gets better over time, right? It's like with these smart glasses, they're getting smarter. That means that whatever data it's collecting,

there is a guy who is watching it. So you know, you're strapping this camera on your face, other people don't even know it's recording. And you think it's your footage, but is it? - So we reached out to Sama for comment

and they got back to us saying that Sama is compliant with international regulations, including GDPR and CCPA, these are privacy laws in Europe and in California. And that they operate under rigorously audited policies and procedures designed to protect

all customer information. - Well, I feel better, I don't even have enough. - Yeah, I mean, thing is all these companies comply with GDPR, right? And yet, you know, things still seem to happen.

But, you know, I'm glad they're not breaking the law.

- Sama was also the same third party contractor

for opening eye for a hot second. - Opening eye, they were trying to develop a content moderation filter that would basically protect future users of their GPT models from being exposed to some of the toxic content that the models are actually

trained on. And so they end up hiring Sama as their third party contractor to help them develop this content moderation filter. There was this brilliant investigation that was done in Time Magazine by Billy Perigo

that exposed the facts that these workers were day in and day out, be exposed to the worst possible content on the internet. As well as AI-generated content where opening eye was literally prompting its own AI models to imagine

even more grotesque scenarios to cover the bases of all of the bad content that could exist in the world. - Yikes. - And these workers were just getting totally traumatized and a lot of the companies that are paying people

to do this, they're not providing them with any preparation. There isn't a psychologist you could talk to. If you see something that gives you PTSD, which is a real thing that happens all the time,

that we never see from our perched thousands of miles away.

- Yeah, I was just talking with this worker actually last week, not in Kenya, but somewhere else, who mentioned to me, he strongly believes there's no such thing as consenting to this work.

This is the defensive contractors like Sama, where they're like, well, we ask the workers whether or not they want to do content moderation. And this worker was like, you literally cannot possibly conceive how bad it is going to be before you have done it.

So you consent, but it's not informed consent. And so one of the amazing things about what's happening right now is one of the reasons why we're seeing so many more stories like this is because the workers are not okay anymore with being hidden.

Like they are actively organizing now to get their story out to make international headlines, to say like, hey, we are literally here

doing some of the most essential work

to make the internet function. And we are being treated horribly, we're being paid poorly, we're being exposed to content that we never could have possibly consented to. And that is part of the agency that they're reclaiming now,

that is then gifting us this new visibility into the hidden pipes of the digital infrastructure that we use every day. - All right, well, I'm tired of talking about all this kind of like an important, like, unsurious, fluffy stuff.

- I want to move on, I want to talk about headphones. What kind of headphones do you guys use? - I have wired headphones and always have, I have never owned a pair of Bluetooth headphones.

“- Wait, you've never owned Bluetooth headphones ever?”

- I've never had them. Here's my problem with Bluetooth headphones. They are headphones, they do the same thing as my headphones, except I need to charge them. It adds an extra layer of work.

It's a perfect technology already. I don't get why I would upgrade. And it seems like the kids today are agreeing with me. - Yeah, as much as every time I talk to Nicky, I feel like I'm dealing with one of these unfrozen cavemen.

It seems like-- - I got that a lot. - He is actually on trend here. - So-- - I'm cool man. - You're so out of date that you've gone--

- You're so out of date that it's on social circle. So let's walk back in time here for a minute. It's 2016, an Apple announces the iPhone 7. And as part of that announcement, they're doing their thing, where they're on stage, they're like,

oh look at our beautiful phone, it's spinning around, and there is no headphone jack. - Oh my God, I remember actually being so-- - I was about that. - I was at the time, I was like, this is the worst day of my life.

- And the same year at that same conference, they announced, the AirPods are new, totally wireless Bluetooth headset.

“And at first, people lost their minds about this, right?”

Like people were, people needed the AirPods, they were making fun of them, or two expensive people said, they look like tampons without strings, or like the head of electric toothbrush, or something people hated them.

But they started to catch on. - They didn't catch on, they were forced upon us. But people jumped on the trend. But there has been over the past year or so, a quiet movement growing in the shadows,

that is built on a simple, but perhaps controversial truth. And that is, wired headphones are better than Bluetooth headphones. And I want to talk about why. But before I do, I mean, like, it really is a trend. So there's this like consumer analytics company called Sercana.

They said that like wired headphones, the sales have been declining every year, five years straight without a break, right? Down and down and down and down and down, down and down. In the second half of last year, all of a sudden,

wired headphone sales exploded.

“And I think there are a couple of reasons for this.”

And one, perhaps, you know, people will want to argue about this, the sound quality in general. You can get better sound if you pick the best wired option than you would get if you spent the exact same money on Bluetooth. - Okay, this is a bit of a revelation for me

because I also haven't seen behaviors around headphones. So I was actually going to use my, I have AirPods. And I was going to use them for this episode so that we could fight about it. But then I've got to charge them.

So Nikki gets a point for that. - Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. There you go. - Yeah.

- But I never, never pay for wired headphones.

- I take them from my flights, it's like every time I go on a flight. - It's fake, they give them to you. - Well, those don't sound better than AirPods.

I'm like, wired headphones are so much worse.

“- Right, it turns out it's because I'm...”

- Yeah, it's because you're taking the ones that American Airlines made. I can't, I can't vouch for those. So it's not, it's not true. Every wired headphone sounds better

than every Bluetooth headphone. Not true, at all. Bluetooth is getting really, really good. Like I went to this specialty store in New York, and they handed me like a pair of like $1,000

Bluetooth headphones, like really fancy, like high-end specialty niche stuff for people who have lost their minds, you know, and I say that with so much love.

And they sounded incredible, right?

But if you're looking at like more mainstream products made by companies that you've heard of, if you pick the best possible option from a wired model and you've got the same money to spend, the wired model is probably, at least for now,

gonna sound better than the best Bluetooth model, that's available. But like as we could see, Karen here's listening to like the 50 cent headphones that you get on an airplane, I wouldn't be able to, I'd rather listen to nothing, honestly.

So like it's not, this isn't about sound quality. So what's going on? I think it's part of a wider trend that people are rejecting the kind of extractive business practices by companies that will lock you in

to having to buy the next thing, or the last thing you have will go obsolete, and you want no longer be able to use it. And I think especially younger people are deciding that they actually want to simplify their lives down,

“but not every new piece of technology you have to keep up with.”

And I think that's a good thing. - The sound quality being approved, I get that, right? The anti-tech backlash where it's like, I'm just going back, I'm going back to some that's a little more analog if you're more comfortable with it.

Okay, that makes sense.

But there's a third thing that's happening here,

which is like cultural and fashion trends. Right now, all of the coolest people in Hollywood and like sports stars, everyone has started switching back to wired headphones. And you're seeing, if you look at paparazzi photos

of like Charlie XX and Ariana Grande and like guys from the NBA, more and more you're seeing these wired, like the white, like porcelain white Apple earbuds dangling from their ears, which used to be, right?

Like if you were still using wired headphones a couple of years ago, like you're an old person. - That's so interesting. - Yeah.

“- I mean, this actually ties back into the privacy theme”

of this episode, right? Like one of the reasons that people are also starting to wired headphones is because Bluetooth is not 100% secure. Well, I don't really buy that.

- Well, that's coming from a post by, not a post, but something Kamala Harris said in an interview, which is that she doesn't use Bluetooth headphones because they get hacked, they get hacked. - So, she was the vice president

that's a much higher target. To me, when I saw that, I was like, is that kind of a tacit admission, the she knows that US at least has the capability of hacking Bluetooth,

which is something that we already vaguely knew. But that's interesting. - But there's another thing, right? Like, there's this huge, I mean, Nicky, I'm sure you see this is like this conspiracy stuff

about how- - Oh, God. - Bluetooth is gonna fry your brain and it's like giving us all cancer or something. Have you guys heard about this? - I had no idea that this was a thing.

- As my brain brain-brain fired. - Okay, so every single time there's a new kind of wireless technology, we saw it with Wi-Fi, we saw it with 3G, we saw it with 5G. Every time that comes in,

there is always a conspiracy theory

that it is in some ways, damaging your brain. This was a conspiracy theory about radio when radio first, right, man, right? There is no evidence whatsoever that Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or 5G is in any meaningful way

doing anything of the sort. - And this kind of this like health thing in 26 where like people aren't satisfied by the fact that there's no evidence for something 'cause they like heard some guy in the internet

and all there's some massive conspiracy going on here. - The thing with these conspiracy theories about stuff traveling through the air, damaging your brain is so pervasive and has such a history that the way we refer

to conspiracy theorists often is tinfoil hat. That is what the tinfoil hat was originally designed. It was for people to put metal on their heads to prevent signals from aliens or from the government,

It's sold, it's built into the literal language

of conspiracy theories. - Yeah, it goes right back to the beginning. - Yeah.

“This speaks to a wider and I think catastrophic problem”

of the way that our internet now gives this information

is that every single thing that passes by our eyeballs

has exactly the same weight as every other thing. - Right, could be the, as you're scrolling, you see something and it sounds plausible, right? You have no way of knowing where that information is coming from and that's a massive problem.

- I personally, I can tell you I am not worried.

I got Bluetooth headphones in right now. If I die, we can do an update to this episode. But if you're worried about the sound quality or if you just want to be cool, you want to look like, you know, the young people

can be up on the latest trend. Maybe, you know, give the wires a try. It's actually kind of nice. And you can be like Nicky, everybody likes Nicky.

“- And I'm cool, I do that's what I'm talking to.”

- Yeah, cool kids now. - Yeah. (upbeat music) - And that's our show. You can listen to the interface on BBC.com

or wherever you get your podcast or watch us on YouTube on the BBC Podcast channel. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us at the interface at BBC.com or you can find us on WhatsApp, send us a message

at plus 4433-207-2472.

“Or if you want to find us on social media,”

you can see all of our handles right down there in the show notes.