{"id":744,"date":"2026-07-22T21:12:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T21:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/officemovingamerica.com\/?p=744"},"modified":"2026-07-22T21:12:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T21:12:18","slug":"welcome-to-your-friendly-21st-century-panopticon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/officemovingamerica.com\/?p=744","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Your Friendly 21st-Century Panopticon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The debate over aggressive surveillance has historically centered on the state \u2013 government was the Big Brother in \u201c1984,\u201d reaching into and dominating every facet of human life. That\u2019s understandable: It wields immense power.<\/p>\n

Read more US Senate Panel Approves Bill to Crack Down on Chinese Vehicles<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But technological breakthroughs are now reshaping fears about spying to include the guy recording his surroundings while sitting next to you in the coffee shop or the reclusive neighbor with the \u201csmart\u201d doorbell that watches you, unblinking, every time you leave the house.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For years I have joked that the coming surveillance dystopia will be a robust public-private partnership, not one modeled on George Orwell\u2019s all-consuming English Socialism. A few recent developments make me think that dystopia is already here, courtesy of consumer electronics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To repurpose the old anecdote<\/u>: We appear to have accepted that we\u2019re going to be recorded. Now we\u2019re just haggling over whether we can stop people from doing so in secret \u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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White Light, White Knight?<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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\u2026 because it turns out that\u2019s apparently what millions of them want to do. Consider the tug of war involving Meta\u2019s AI glasses, pitting the company against its own users, who desire to film or photograph other people without their knowledge, much less their permission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Each pair has a white light in the forward-facing part of the frame. Meta says the light blinks once when the wearer takes a photo and blinks continuously as long as they are recording a video.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s there so people around you know when you are taking a photo or video you could save to your gallery and share with others,\u201d the company said<\/u> in an early July post on its official website.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So what are some users trying to do? They started by covering up the light. Meta made it so the camera is disabled if the company detects that what it calls the \u201ccapture LED\u201d has been blocked. So users escalated to \u201csophisticated efforts\u201d to modify or destroy the light.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cNow we\u2019re updating the glasses to disable the camera if they detect the LED was physically tampered with or destroyed,\u201d Meta said in its July 7 post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The stakes aren\u2019t just about who appears on whose camera roll: Two Harvard undergraduates showed in 2024 that you could pair \u201csmart\u201d glasses with face search engines, large language AI models and public databases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cTheir viral project, I-XRAY, is a pair of glasses that reveal to the wearer anyone\u2019s personal details \u2013 home address, name, phone number and more \u2013 just by looking at them,\u201d according to a Harvard University post<\/u>.<\/p>\n

Read more Chinese AI\u2019s Role in Stopping Rogue OpenAI Agent Shows Cost of US Guardrails<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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No thanks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Recording Everything<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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The Meta glasses thing was pretty scary, but the impetus for this column was a Wall Street Journal piece<\/u> last week in which Katherine Bindley documented people recording \u2026 pretty much everything and running it through AI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAsking for permission is out, even though in some situations, that could mean violating the law. It isn\u2019t creepy if it\u2019s in the name of productivity, say the people doing the recording,\u201d Bindley wrote. (I\u2019m here to tell you that nonconsensual recording is, in fact, creepy.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here, too, consumer electronics are making it increasingly easy to record others, notably a transcription app called Granola that does not store audio but produces a word-for-word transcript, along with summaries or possible action items.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The showstopper in Bindley\u2019s piece was the woman who uses Granola on \u201cmost of her first dates\u201d then \u201chas the feed automatically sent to Anthropic\u2019s Claude to report back on how she did.\u201d That includes a breakdown of who spoke for what proportion of the encounter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Would you speak differently if you knew anyone around you might be recording?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Search Party or Hunting Party?<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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Would you dress or act differently if you knew that your neighbor\u2019s smart doorbell not only recorded who comes to or leaves your house but is connected to what amounts to a surveillance grid?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s the concern raised<\/u> by the Electronic Frontier Foundation about Amazon\u2019s Ring and its Search Party feature, which uses AI to scan footage from nearby smart doorbells. Amazon sells this tech as a way to reunite lost pets and their distraught owners.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the technology, EFF wrote, could usher in \u201ca world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track and locate anything \u2013 human, pet and otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since Ring regularly interfaces with law enforcement, it does not take much to erase the boundaries between private security and public surveillance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Barring a political response to rein in the brave new world of small, cheap, effective tech, we\u2019re looking at a world in which every glance is an act of surveillance and every neighbor is a data collector.<\/p>\n

Read more EU Regulators Clear With Conditions Paramount\u2019s $110 Billion Bid for Warner Bros<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The future is less Big Brother than everyone and their brother.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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