Everything you do is being recorded
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> But soon, the average person might need to deploy surveillance countermeasures.
Already there. If you want privacy and anonymity online, you're looking at literal terrorist cell tier tradecraft. That means pulling up documents written by people from the "counterterrorism community" and "intelligence community" and learning how all of these "clandestines" operate.
Unlinking one's identity from one's actions and speech requires some serious OPSEC now. It requires constant, never ending effort. It requires perfect execution and discipline.
Own a general purpose computer you can run arbitrary software on, not just corporation and government approved software? You're clearly a money laundering drug trafficking child molesting terrorist.
I can't be the only person who has thought of this.
It might work if your fingerprint was used while you were unconscious, but any solution that starts with "setup a trigger that wipes a device" is already on shaky grounds.
There are videos on youtube where the lawyers tell you what your rights are at traffic stops, also there are ones that talk about the different rules when coming through immigration. These can be painful to see when they show the ones where cops ignore limits.
So at the border, they tell you that you are legally required to provide your finger print, you do that, and don't say a word. I'm sure it will be a bad day for you, regardless of how it works out after years of litigation on whether it is your duty to tell them how NOT to unlock your device.
It isn't on shaky grounds: you protect your private device from everyone, not just from some "law enforcement". If you want to protect your private device from any party (e.g. thieves, trivially), it will also be protected against law enforcement agents as a side effect.
And remember that the context here is you explaining your digital booby trap to a judge who thinks you might have deliberately destroyed evidence.
"Wipe the data after a number of failed logon attempts".
I understand that this does not fit completely with the "in front of law enforcement" idea, but it opposes your «any solution that starts with "setup a trigger that wipes a device" [would be] already on shaky grounds»: we can very legitimately setup triggers that wipe devices in the possibility that the device falls into random hands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/us/duress-password-phone-...
Intentionally giving a duress PIN which you know will wipe evidence - information you were just asked for by some law enforcement - just robs you of more of years and money. The law is lopsided and gives some more power than others. There's no point debating why it's like that, try to change the law before you break it or find ways to not need to break it at all.
The law here is destruction of evidence. The guy destroyed evidence by giving the wrong password to the police. If the police had destroyed it of their own accord, he'd be free. If the duress PIN was 1234 and the police just tried it, he'd be free.
There are all sorts of situations where people go free despite the wistful desires of prosecutors, due to the details of what happened and what the law actually says.
Of course it should be code. More specifically, it should be completely deterministic.
This idea that judges/courts can interpret the law however they feel like it in each individual case is what gives power to dictatorships. Then there is no way to know what is legal vs not, each scenario is different and the courts will inevitably choose what favors them. So yes, ideally, law should absolutely be "code" (deterministic).
(Common sense tells me that the accusation might make sense both in cases in which the accused knows about a crime and in cases in which the accused knows about a police investigation, even in the absence of a crime, but deleting nude photographs to stop a customs officer from seeing them, for a random example, would that be a crime?)
"You dumbass! You use my thumb to trigger duress mode! Don't you know thumb is always wipe, and PIN is always unlock? Moron!"
For now. It doesn't seem like an especially natural fit. Regardless of the merits of being able to compelled to turn over your password, relying on labored interpretation of laws is not a good idea: 14th amendment was always a very shaky basis for abortion rights, as the 2nd is a very shaky one for personal gun rights.
Nitpick, but that's only if you have biometric authentication configured in the first place, which you aren't compelled to do.
I'm sure they will claim its a crime if you set it up that way, but is it?
They can already legally compel you to provide your fingerprint. You can't avoid that, you'll get put in jail. Do you have to tell them "don't do that with my phone, it will reset everything if you do that".
According to?
> Law enforcement officials in Catalonia say they associate Pixels with crime because drug traffickers are increasingly turning to these phones
And that is correct behaviour under frequentistic reasoning (and still abysmal behaviour in the non-expressed potential case that it be done indiscriminately): if in a population a tool is related to many criminals and the very few sane people, that tool is a justified element for suspicion. But for suspicion only, in the coldest terms: the Sane use it, and using it is a sign of sanity: for that reason, of course you do not /assume/ that those who use that tools are criminals.
To have a knife raises suspect in the land of the stabbers and raises little suspect in the land of the scouts.
Only the bad tail of the curve mixes "suspect" and "assumption"; and only the worse tail of the curve thinks that since stabbers use knives we should do without them. Especially in this dire case in which obviously for reasons of Dignity, we will not, all capitals, ___will not___, keep spying devices on us. It is difficult to find examples and similes stronger than the actual case.
The article in fact fumbles into a very bad sentence:
> You might be wondering: if I don’t have anything to hide, why should I bother using GrapheneOS? That[!!!] a fair question
No, that is a very stupid question: Dignity imposes privacy, and we have ___everything___ to hide to the zombie apocalypse of cretins.
Maybe it's just a dodgy phone, maybe it's not doing something on the less-trackable sim connection, but I realised I can never really know.
The pixel 6a does terribly when it is in 5g mode, something abput the hardware is broken or bugged. My friend who has a 6a has to keep it in 4g only mode or sacrifice battrry life.
might just be an older phone and older battery
I used to think he was just paranoid...
Don't doubt it for even a second.
His mistrust might be about the phone's owner and the recording apps they might use, more than the smartphone itself.
Socially it's much safer to direct suspicion at "the smartphone" rather than the people invited to your house.
In reality, deliberately taking a second recording device other than your phone, escalates intention and risk. If we assume the visitors were unaware of the phone rule before arrival, there's no chance anyone will bring a second recording device.
> A visitor who wants to record...
Will use the recording device they already carry.
If discovered, your phone can hide behind a million excuses. "whoops, I forgot to end my call" or "whoops, I forgot to shut down my streaming app." It can also hide its recording status when using certain covert or custom apps. It is the ultimate recording device able to operate in the open.
Not as easy as one may think. If you put a phone in a generic waterproof metal box (metal junction or biscuit box for instance) and call it with another one, most of the time it will still ring...
So your test may seem successful, but the box not be enough closer to a tower, or if your neighbor added a new AP, or if cell phone frequencies changed since you bought and tested it. Moreover, if you have to open and close it often, you have to be careful that the attenuation doesn't degrade.
All that to say that the "Faraday box solution" would mean testing it regularly with professional instruments and all that. It is far simpler and cheaper to ask guests to leave their phones in their cars.
This is an odd formulation. What is one's identity other than one's actions (physical body) and speech (mental state serialized into language)?
you don't say...
This will sure make all the dogs in 20m radius mad. Hence the solution for the stealth recorder -- bring a dog, then complain about the ultrasound jammer (or at least to be aware of a jammer)
From the paper, it looks like the authors did not consider safety of animals, only human hearing safety.
My dog has no problem shitting on their lawns, and even sometimes pees on the devices.
So I'd like to find any actual devices which work on dogs (well I have no use for it but just to be sure they actually exist), because circa the original iphone I remember that there were apps which could reliably make its microphones do it (and impact dogs as expected).
Give him a treat from me, that made me smile. (I also hate those devices)
The Home Depot here uses one in the garden area and I can't shop there for more than a couple minutes. our wal-mart used to have one in the produce section, fortunately finally removed.
Worst superpower ever.
When I look at something these days I ask the question "On the whole does this benefit society?"
Society here been scale specific, so local community, wider community, population of my country, population of the world.
I.e. bin policies changes by my local council aren't going to affect someone in Africa and so on.
Depressingly the answer is almost always in aggregate... No.
We seem to be determined to allow the worst of us to make things worse for us to their own benefit.
Also, it lays the groundwork to absolutely crush dissent in the future .
It is the over-reaction to 911. The 3-letter agencies were all traumatized by not knowing in advance that they pushed every single anti-privacy initiative possible. Like the PATRIOT ACT which was already written when 911 happened.
The current administration has shown that they use all these recording stuffs in order to persecute their political enemies.
That is in fact a matter that is subject to serious debate.
Pretext.
it is explicitly meant to do this -- that's the point of marketing and propaganda.
marketing exists to change consumer behavior. what do you think google or facebook intended to do w/ all of the data it's slurping up?
if they could beam a laser at your head to do full on mind control they would, and would auction off timeshare of the lasers to the highest bidder. failing that, they have to use more subtle methods
we need a government that is antagonistic towards corporations that are abusing us.
it’s wild how much influence they have and how little pushback the government ever gives them when they clearly abuse us from every direction.
However, I would argue that in the US, we "used to" have far better separation prior to the 1970s, and even better than that before the 1930s. It has significantly deteriorated over the past 100 years, and the deterioration has continuously accelerated during my lifetime.
Please don't. The entire civilized world for all of history and before has been built on the uncomfortable alliance between power/capability and governance/legitimacy. Protection-seeking is the primary support system for tyranny which is happy to induce the chaos they protect you from.
We just need enough negative feedback for any kind of abuse that it stops, because regulations have to be slow to be accurate and thus invite abuse innovation. The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition so people can vote with their feet.
So, ask not for antagonism but for real alternatives.
>The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition
The comment you responded to allows for "corporations that abuse us" to include those that actively try to prevent effective competition. You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem.
Yeah, sorry. Yes, corporate activities that reduce competition or corrupt regulators should have their agents and causes ripped out branch to root; they're like diseases which attack the immune system, doubly bad.
But the premise that a corporation or a country that does bad things means you are justified in antagonizing or destroying the entire company or the people is typically enlistment and leverage for protection rackets.
Warring with others is a cycle that doesn't end, and mainly elevates military resource providers. Warring with yourself - attacking your own organs - is self-destructive (which is why enemies stimulate it).
As for here vs there, 20th-century totalitarian systems all stemmed from people wanting to believe promises of a better world, and the promotors being unbound by facts of the present. "Here" is a much more tractable problem, where our medicine (or immune systems) could get better at stemming the diseases we have, like the lack of negative feedback for abusing people (more generally for exporting costs, esp. to the future), or the corruption of discourse that mediates agreements about governance. My goal would be to leave the world more free, peaceful, nature-healthy than I found it. Antagonism doesn't help for that, and side-tracks people into regressive emotions.
A company selling me widgets wouldn't store or let another company store extra information about me if it subjected them the widget seller to HIPAA. Or better yet, something more stringent.
We don't need the government to be antagonistic toward corporations; we just need a government that makes the corporations internalize the risk they're making us take.
[1] The fact that ToS are enforceable when every court in the country knows that only a vanishly small percentage of people ever read them, much less understand them, means that they're not doing their job.
This is how healthcare workers used to treat health information protected by HIPAA, but it seems like the big corporations don't really even care about it. Nothing ever comes from violations besides slap on the wrist/cost of doing business penalties. You can't do anything without waiving all your rights, granting permission to be recorded, granting permission to use your photograph for anything they want, allowing your recorded audio to run through AI for transcription (and whatever else they want to do), granting permission to share your data with their partners, associates, and some vague description of "anyone we decide at a later date". That's before you can even sign-up, receive care, have a service rendered, enter into a business establishment.
There's pages of fine print documenting it all in vague terms that ambiguously safe guard the provider from any liability, but half the time, you don't even get to opportunity to (not) read it. It's just a link to go elsewhere and (not) read it. They add as many steps between you even reading what rights you're giving away, so that even the people who had a mind to do so would get fatigued, and they make you do it while there are people queuing up behind you, or you're almost done with your purchase/subscription, etc.
Everything is so consumer hostile (and expensive in America), but no "better" service can swoop in, because the established Big corps get to break all the rules or can afford the token penalties to give them an unstoppable market share no honest disruptor/competition could ever overcome. On even ground, no competent person would choose to be abused by our resident monopolies vs a reasonably similar priced local upstart, and a lot people would even pay (a little) more for a better experience/product/service.
No doctor ever complained. You don't need to enter most of that info.
Most of the videos talk about reducing burden on clinicians. Specifically: sharing, accessing, updating patient history. Providing clinicians and patients guidance through the medical process through AI agents (that have access to your PII). the kaiser permanente guy highlighted ai's use in guiding billing codes. Dr. Oz spoke about getting pre-authorizations near instantaneously
I'm not sure how that gets accomplished without reducing liability or loosing restrictions. I wouldnt be surprised to see a continued attack on our healthcare privacy
I would have figured there would have been a massive financial interest in providers not having to waste time dealing with tedious Q&A and data entry with new patients…
So no, requiring explicit consent won't fix anything.
This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.
However, corporations - for some reason - are given a pass.
What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.
I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life.
So, let's not bumble over inapt euphemism. There is for sure a far worse scenario that can be offered - but there is a far better outcome, if an intelligence super-state is to be accomplished 'to protect the people', then the people need the means by which to protect themselves, from it.
That is for sure not happening right now. We are all having our human rights violently violated, every millisecond of a handle.
So, what I am proposing - and not at all surprised is being misunderstood - is that I don't mind them recording the details of my life, as long as I am the first and foremost customer - i.e. completely private in the recording system - until and unless there is some democratic order from the state which requires me to unlock the timeline. In which case, I'm fine with it - because I ain't no terrorist, and I'd be a happier person if, instead of the government using weapons to protect me, it instead just made sure my legacy was backed up in the big human digital cloud that is now propelling itself through the universe.
You know, instead of Zuck/Musk/&co., it were just a wide open, well maintained, public good.
No, this does not mean I want NSA-spooks spying on me. That is different from being recorded. The only time I want my fully backed up data made available publicly, is when I need to defend myself against claims of criminal behavior.
I don't believe in the secret intelligence apparatus, one bit. I'd be far happier with an open intelligence apparatus, invested in, by the people I elect to maintain democratic principles. The anti-thesis to the surveillance state.
I think it would be a valuable service a government could perform for me - assuming there were a way to make sure the data was not accessed without my side of the key. Like, it is only after I have been arrested that the data is accessible to the court in which I will have been presented to face accusations of a crime.
I would also think it pretty neat, were I able to use it as a backup over my life, for my own purposes - if I could do it without involving the spooks. Like, let me use the technological spy infrastructure, and if I happen to commit a crime, well then - come on in, inspect my data by all means.
This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.
And there's the corporations who - for some reason - are given a pass. If governments can steal your data, so can Mr. FatCat and his team of merry department heads.
What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.
I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life, for review. This kind of super-wide view of things would be quite enlightening, I'm pretty sure.
[1] - just for the record, I think the problems that the NSA are trying to solve are obsolete; that there are far greater solutions to fallacies which support the utility of it as an organ of government; I am in the camp that this is a massive human rights issue, also.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. "
And if you think a government has any interest in protecting their people, well, that is simply inaccurate in practice.
The government exists to organise and pacify its people, to prevent unpredictable or counter-productive behaviour. Primarily to protect the government from its people.
Regulation doesn't protect people, it protects the government, corporations, or both, in the same way HR protects the company from its employees. The people benefit coincidentally, if at all.
The people elect the leaders, and the corporations bankroll the operations. Every time a new hot startup comes about, the government anticipates an army of highly paid (read: top tax bracket) individuals being cultivated.
No they don't, people do, always have and always will. The owners of these corporations simply have an undue level of control over the collective wealth created by the people.
What you said sounds nice, but is it actually the case? Because as far as I can tell, we're all out here being willfully delegated work by corporations rather than taking the risk of doing it ourselves.
This again points to how these problems have less to do with tech than with our socioeconomic system. The obvious solution (or step towards a solution) is to just shatter all such large tech companies. There should not be any companies powerful enough to do things like this.
If you're looking for the ones responsible for bringing this on, just look in the mirror.
How can you say both "oh, people won't need jobs anymore! I'm excited that technology is going to replace what I do" and "oh, I can't speak up about the things my company is doing, I need this job!" in the same breath?
please check this out
PS: Something in this vein that many people are unaware of is that the 6G standard for cell towers is planned to include ISAC (Integrated Sensing and Communication). I haven’t heard a single AFK person talk about this.
Being resigned to something is not the same as wanting that thing.
The outrageous prices of used (low telemetry) cars make them a poor value proposition, for example. Depending on the model, a used car can be a decade old with half of its lifetime miles on it already and the seller will still want $14k or something crazy like that. When you factor in the parts of its history that carfax doesn’t cover and the stream of repairs you’re likely to be saddled with, finding a 0%-2% financing deal on something new at ~$20-24k begins to look a lot more attractive.
There was a comment made here a month or two ago, about someone from a SE Asia country (I forget which; maybe Bangladesh?) talking about how their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over, and they went from one of the deadliest, most chaotic road systems in the world to Singapore-level rule-following in the space of just a couple months.
As a result, the cameras have become quite popular because there's less traffic, travelling is easier and more predictable, and road deaths have plummeted.
I imagine there are a number of similar situations in every country, where the deployment of AI surveillance has a sufficiently measurably positive impact that it becomes popular.
What does the AI actually do? Identify specific cars and their drivers, or something? What actual enforcement actions were taken as a result, and against how many drivers before it stopped?
One might wonder how much of the effect was placebo (i.e., people conforming simply due to the belief of being surveilled).
Yes, exactly. It identifies cars and drivers who are committing traffic violations, and issues citations.
I don't have the specific numbers you ask for, seeing as I can't even remember the country, but it's not difficult to imagine that if sufficiently many such cameras are installed that most moving violations on major roadways are caught and punished, then yes, people will come to (reasonably) believe that the cost of committing the violation is close to the price of the fine, rather than close to zero.
It's one thing to blow by a pedestrian crossing the street, it's another to do so knowing you'll probably be charged $150 (or whatever) for having done it.
In this case, incentives are for people who'd like to reduce traffic deaths.
If you read "one can see how someone might not object to this" and understand "this is a good thing to have" then I'm afraid the issue is you contributing the stats that news agencies like to publish about American reading comprehension trends.
It's a trained model, just like Claude.
Your choice to see "AI" and assume some narrow definition is a personal issue that you could correct on your own if you chose.
We're in a thread about AI surveillence.
Note the "I imagine there are a number of similar situations in every country, where the deployment of AI surveillance has a sufficiently measurably positive impact that it becomes popular"
Someone said please don't refer to license plate scanners as AI. One can be obtuse and take that at face value, or one could read it as "please don't lump more deterministic ML together haphazardly by calling them all AI. "
This is what I mean by broad and narrow. You could have said technological surveillence and it had the same effect.
We're only in a thread about AI surveillance because I used the work "AI" when describing the license plate cameras.
Neither the comment I replied to, nor the original article, are particularly about AI in general nor about LLMs specifically. They're about data collection. The "AI" topic is a tangent.
I don't see the difference between "please don't lump more deterministic ML together haphazardly by calling them all AI" and taking what was said at face value. I completely understand the commenter's request that I encode their values into my speech in the way they prefer! I just disagree with them and decline to do so. What you misread as me being obtuse and not "reading" it correctly, is in fact just me saying "no".
Or there is simply not enough staff available to carry out the procedures needed to apprehend and charge the individual. Or a myriad of other things. People think law enforcement is easy.
They are mounted extremely obviously for this purpose.
I greatly hope they never catch anyone doing anything.
Easiest example is having your own dash cam (don’t know why all auto manufacturers don’t have Tesla style camera recordings, especially given that all new cars come with cameras anyway).
Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.
Maybe you could use a trusted timestamping service to stamp keyframes or stills from your video while you're recording? If the time of the recording is not in question, it would bound the kind of video editing people could plausibly claim that you could've done.
It's not foolproof - if you have enough face data of the person you want to frame and you've been to the room where the conversation takes place, you could have made a fake video beforehand and spliced it into the conversation at the time of the recording. But that would at least take a lot of preparation and quite a bit of luck and timing to find a place in the conversation that's just long enough to copy your edited version in without arousing suspicion. For dashcam videos it would be difficult to merge your edit with existing traffic, etc...
There's a pretty substantial legal difference between the contested opinion of two people in court versus deliberately fabricating evidence to try and deceive a judge.
Suddenly your civil matter is now a criminal one.
it's easy to fall into complain hole, as that seems to fulfill the 1st part
but 2nd part is as much or even more valuable
I wish I knew what you were talking about here.
It seems like the easy way would be to forbid the collection of this data… but that is obviously not happening, so I need a different part 2.
making easier the alternatives to phone tracking means promoting life outside phones, promoting cellphones/OSes that don't spy on you and explaining ways to minimize tracking (like disabling apps' access to the internet)
making easier the alternatives to Meta means promoting competitors, promoting communication/image/information channels outside Meta, promoting life outside Meta products
defeatism is even worse than grumbles - it fulfills neither of the goals
One should never underestimate the power of combining data sets.
This, of course, requires 6G base stations to be spaced pretty tightly (hundreds of meters apart) and to feature sophisticated phased array antennas. But both can be assumed in cities (they're planning to completely replace WIFI with 6G, so every current WIFI access point will become a 6G micro cell). Walking humans can be detected much easier, but radar SNR is funny, that only gives you 4x-6x the detection range.
Software (signals processing) for all that will be... a lot of difficult work. Object separation/tracking, multipath reflections, clutter suppression, ect.
My sad realization is that the Buddhists were right all along. The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance. What you are describing here is greed. People want to get useful things for free. This is the core of the problem. If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted. Instead, they want stuff for free and they choose to be willfully blind to the spying.
The spying may have started with free products, but it has metastasized into every aspect of life, free or not. It always does.
> choose to be willfully blind to the spying
Many don't. They also, by and large, don't have a choice. Data brokers, Flock cameras, WiFi-based radar[1]. You really can only do so much as an individual before the only escape is being a hermit in a cave.
> The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance
Which then gets distilled into the only drivers of corporations. Corporations that then destroy all moral options for individuals.
[1]https://theweek.com/tech/wifi-signals-now-tracking-users-at-...
Before cellphones, there were payphones everywhere for people to use when they needed to get into contact. Now there are hardly any left in most countries, so your ability to communicate would actually be worse than in the pre-cellphone era. Sure you could ask someone to use their phone, but if a stranger asked me that these days I would likely refuse.
It is entirely optional.
Seems very country / region specific?
This doesn't mean much. I know multiple people who fit this description, live in the US, and can't speak or read English. However, speaking English isn't meaningfully optional. You will face constant limitations and problems in every aspect of life. There are people who don't use electricity, so I guess by your definition that's optional too?
> I never think about not having one.
Sure you don't.
A major downside of this is that if someone did figure out how to withdraw a bunch of my money from my account, I wouldn't notice until I go to the bank, which I only do once per month or so. I wish my bank had an option to send me an email on every transaction, but as is I have to go to the ATM and request an email with the recent transaction info.
Partially as a result of this limitation, and partially because I enjoy playing the "Where's George?" game (which involves using cash), I pay for everything with cash and only use my debit card for withdrawing cash. I've heard that it's possible to get an ATM-only card for this purpose, so I will probably do that eventually, so that if someone gets my card information they will not be able to make online transactions.
The look of confusion on people's face when I don't want to scan a random code or install an app. It's my phone damnit, my phone shouldn't need software so you can sell me things.
Except it really isn't, it just seems that way when you spend a bunch of time on your phone. As part of an utterly graceless transition to middle age I bailed on social media and have aggressively refused to engage with service-related apps of any kind (fuck mychart, drive-thru mobile apps, and the horse they rode in on). To the extent that I use my phone at all these days it's to check text messages, field calls, and (rarely) navigate via maps. I've reverted to the Old Ways (mailing paper checks, calling ahead to get live humans to explain shit, etc) and it's been pretty frictionless. I've yet to encounter a situation where I was prevented from doing anything because I didn't phone.
Actually compared to signing in to a website, 2FA, dismissing the popups to explore new features, entering payment info, then confirming---writing a check and putting it in an envelope takes less time.
I used to carry a legit dumbphone (not one of the new Android/AOSP “dumbphones”) and that worked just as well. It’s even trendy now!
This is why governments exist.
In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing. Since they ostensibly do not understand all of the potential ways in which they can be screwed over, how is calling themselves government going to magically change that? Maybe you are imagining a dictatorship instead, where the government is only a subset of all consumers, but even then the dictators are still just feeble consumers themselves remaining within the subset of all consumers. Being a dictator doesn't make you omniscient; still only human like all the others.
Government exists to clean up the outliers who are not behaving in line with the wishes of the consumers, but that cleanup can only occur when their undesirable behaviour is out there for all to plainly see. You cannot enforce what you don't recognize.
> consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree.
Temporarily, perhaps, but in a functioning market one of those consumers feeling underserved will rise up to offer what's missing, eventually satisfying consumers again. However, ironically, consumers often consider that undesirable behaviour and use government to block that rising from occurring. For some reason consumers prefer to protect the market incumbents even when they claim to not like what the incumbents are doing.
This is a straw man. Consumers are represented by representatives who should have their interests in mind, e.g the consumer votes for someone who in turn votes for outcomes. This means that there can absolutely be a difference in knowledge between the government and its citizens, and so no, they are not the exact same thing. One group is trying to do their job of being a citizen, while the other group should be doing their job of representing the interests of the citizens that voted on them in whatever is relevant. One job clearly should not involve making sure your privacy isn't constantly and covertly violated by foreign nationals, and one job clearly should. Which is which is an exercise for the reader.
> but in a functioning market
Great! Where can I find me one of those?
Exactly. Representatives are merely messengers, so they can only represent the consumers when sharing the message of the consumers to the extent that the consumers have already recognized. Furthermore, representatives are only consumers themselves, so even if you imagine them not as representatives but dictators who step up and act for the people based on how they believe the people want to be overseen rather than from working with citizens they still have all the same blind spots.
> Great! Where can I find me one of those?
Where consumers don't like protecting the market incumbents. But, make no mistake, consumers love nothing more than protecting market incumbents. It gives them something to complain about when idly chatting with each other. Great? Something tells me you wouldn't find it great at all.
No, that is not how representation works. The representative represents, i.e they act in the absence of the citizen. They are not the human equivalent of an email broker.
> representatives are only consumers themselves
No, they are informed experts, or have informed experts at their disposal, to deeply understand the subject matter at hand so they can weigh it against the broad wishes of whom they represent. Furthermore, they have the time and responsibility to use their knowledge wisely.
> but dictators who step up and act for the people
I'm not sure why you keep bringing up dictators. Dictators don't step up and act for the people, that's what representatives do in a democracy. Are you from the US by chance? In that case I can understand why this concept is new.
> consumers love nothing more than protecting market incumbents
This is like saying: consumers sure did love dying from polio before the vaccine was invented.
Prior to this discussion, he was eager to be on social media apps because other kids his age were on them. People respond to knowledge about these topics, but there isn’t a mainstream popular individual talking about it. Everyone is so silo’d, it would be quite difficult to reach people, and depending upon the political leanings of such a person, half the population would reactively go the opposite direction… on what really shouldn’t be partisan.
This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy. The use of providers like Meta does not reflect a well-informed, freely chosen preference. Meta spends a ton of money to squash competition, remove viable alternatives, and to make their products addictive.
The fallacy here is that you think people should have difference preferences than they actually do. "People disagree with me? They must be ill-informed."
Meta has done a lot of shitty things to acquire and addict users, and is analogous to a massive regional monopoly in the U.S. Both of those indicate that users of Facebook might be less than rational (in the economic sense) about their choice of social media product.
Any link to the trachea vibrations to reproduce inner monologue source?
I think the major shift with the 6g standard is that general purpose sensing is now explicit to the design and intended use of the system.
- Consumers largely do not know these things. They are either not disclosed, or buried within a TOS that they cannot read. This is all done on purpose. The reason the TOS is obtuse, long, inaccurate, and updated weekly is so you won't read or understand it.
- In most markets there is no choice. For smartphones you do not have a choice, both Apple and Google do extensive surveillance. If you want to bank, get a job, and all around be successful, you have to swallow the surveillance cost. If you want a new car, again, no choice. If you work a job, again, no choice on the computer or software.
- It is not reasonable to expect consumers to do extensive research on everything they buy. Consumers have lives, children, jobs. They're not going to sit and spend 10+ hours researching every thing they buy, especially when most of that research is fruitless.
- There are tradeoffs with everything. Yes we can use Linux, I sure do. But for other consumers, now they need to spend a lot of time understanding that. Yes we can use Graphene OS, but certain apps won't work.
Zero people want to be surveilled. They want the other benefits that come with technology and reluctantly accept, as a cost, some lower of privacy.
Yikes, was not aware of this
It's a lot more disgusting and universally hated when you hear about a peeping tom, or a pervert, or a jealous ex hounding someone,
but when faceless corporations and governments do it to EVERYBODY 24/7, everyone's like, ehh.
I mean, right now, just think about me, clicking on your HN profile, googling your name, going through all your public photos.. Don't you find me repulsive just talking about that?
You might find something I wrote interesting. Then whatever public info there is on me helps you to get to know me a bit better. You may stop there and forget about me, or you may try to reach out.
There is nothing wrong about that.
Me googling your shit might lead to your real name, your family photos etc
Just because it's all public doesn't mean you want the cashier from the supermarket following you around to your family picnic
or just because you like to let the sunlight in doesn't mean you want random pedestrians peering in through your windows..
I can't believe this needs to be spelled out here: "Public" life is compartmentalized.
This has never happened to me. Out of the space of “bad things that can happen to me” I don’t have time to worry about things with such a small probability of occurring.
An estimated 2.7 million Australian adults have experienced stalking since the age of 15, according to new results from the 2021-22 Personal Safety Survey (PSS) released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
William Milne, ABS head of crime and justice statistics, said “We found one in five women and one in 15 men have been stalked.
“Women were almost eight times more likely to be stalked by a male than by a female, while men were stalked by a male and by a female at a similar rate.”
It's about someone "connecting the dots" between ALL your public activities.
Someone following you OUTSIDE their "space" that you visited and then invading your other spaces.
People don't usually want to mix their social circles. e.g. nobody likes a snoopy overprotective parent following their [teen] kids around wherever the children go with their friends.
Nobody likes their spouse coming uninvited on a night out with the guys/gals.
Or, when you reply to someone on HN or Reddit, and they don't like what you say about 1 specific topic, then they go and downvote ALL your comments about everything else you said!
That's perfectly legal. It's allowed. Nothing's stopping it. And hey, you commented publicly so you were "asking for it", right?
BUT IT'S A FUCKING DICK MOVE
Customers of such datasets: banks, insurance companies, HR companies, marketing firms, governments, etc.
Disturbed people with access to this data can use it to harm people, like the Ebay exec who stalked a critic or the occasional police officer who stalks a romantic interest.
I do understand what you are getting at. I just don’t find people repulsive by being curious of me; even if they find materials I myself did not make public.
As an aside, I sometimes stumble upon websites of people who write and show pictures of themselves and their family. I find them beautiful[0] to visit and hope more people would do that, as was more common 20 years ago.
If they do it just to reach out to you with good intentions then it's fine. But if they do it to dox you or harm you in any other way, then it's not fine.
There could be a number of reasons. Am I not trying hard enough?
My privacy is important as a matter of consent.
But I should not have to hide my sexuality or identity, nor my politics and if my support of a marginalized group exists then what is the point of hiding it while they are oppressed? What benefit does that bring?
Encouraging people to be private in their views and anymore and anonymous in their "support" is exactly how fascists crush their opposition.
You shouldn't but you can't and will never be able to know what the future looks like. You could be in libertine Berlin of the 1920s and be hunted down by fascists a decade later because of your ancestry or sexuality.
And don't think that can't happen quickly again, it's not much of a hyperbole given the way the world is going. And nowadays, once you put something on the internet, good luck getting rid of it. So I'd be very careful with what I disclose, it's not paranoia any more. I'm European and flew to the US earlier this year and got asked to disclose my social media profiles. I have none, deleted them a decade ago. Is that sane or moral? No but if that's how the US rolls these days imagine where else your data can end up.
Corporations aren't people. They do not and cannot present a personal threat to you.
Even your trailing example falls flat on this: for the activity to be distressing you had to recontextualize it back to the individual level.
...is this for real
Holy fucking hell. Someone please, I can't
Corporations have toppled democratic governments, run dodgy drug trials and given breast feeding mothers just enough free powdered milk to stop being able to feed their babies.
We have large online retailers, Temu and Shein, accused of using forced labour aka slavery.
Even a well known SaaS operation like eBay was caught sending live spiders to woman who criticised them[2].
Corporations are entities with legal rights but are motivated solely by profit. Without laws to regulate them they would unemotionally run right over you.
Corporation are, and I choose my words carefully, absolute cunts.
They can 100% can present a threat to you. We wouldn't have the concept of corporate manslaughter if they didn't.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company
2. https://apnews.com/article/786117108cdfefb40e691b1b3420c689
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
did not know that!
You'd imagine that if this global surveillance was so ubiquitous, finding a match between an employee and employer would've been an... easier problem. However, even though supply is only a little larger than demand, the nature of this supply is to oversaturate the matching system, which then defaults to... I don't even know what, perhaps dropping 99% of all applications at random? Only taking 1% of those who applied sooner? Must be something like that.
Anyways, recording everything is a way to overwhelm the system with useless data. It would be much scarier if recording was selective.
But why? Don't we already have phones, watches, glasses, tags, and airpods? If they were making a siri version of alexa/echo, then maybe that would make sense, but do we really need a specific apple device just to ai?
Apple Watch is just extension of screen and notifications from the phone, so there is no overlap.
AirTags have nothing to do with AI stuff.
AirPods apparently now have some translation stuff, but again no constant monitoring.
Apple does not produce glasses and seeing the backlash to Meta's glasses I don't think they will. A pin or pendant might be more acceptable, although hiding it will be just as big of an issue as with the creepy Meta glasses, but any AI thing Apple makes should be a separate product if they want to maximize profits.
Word has it that they're working on them, but no idea until wwdc 2027.
Where did you got that impression?
Apple Watch have lots of apps. It can make phone call and do voice recording without the phone nearby.
Curious, do you have a source for this apart from Apple's marketing?
A good example is the age sniffing. You literally have the same restrictive law coming up in all democracies, with only miniscule differences. This is not a coincidence.
You gotta be on somebody's books
The lowdown a picture of your face
Your injured looks The sacred and profane
The pleasure and the pain
Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
No kidding?
No CAPTCHA, no geo-blocking, no archive.today annoyances
No Javascript, text-only
Option 1
tnftp -4o"|grep -Eo 'flatplan-paragraph.*GpNxD' \
|sed 's/.\{26\}/<meta charset=utf-8>/;s/<div.*//'" \
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-surveillance-countermeasures/687203/ > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
tnftp -4o"|tr -d '\134' \
|grep -Eo 'innerHtml...[^\}]+' \
|sed '
1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8>/;
s/innerHtml.../<p>/g;
s/\",\"index\":[0-9]*//g;
s/\"//g;
s/u003c/</g;
s/u003e/>/g;
'" \
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-surveillance-countermeasures/687203/ > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
links https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-surveillance-countermeasures/687203/
elinks https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-surveillance-countermeasures/687203/
Add CSP to response headers to disable Javascript, something like
http-response add-header Content-Security-Policy "script-src 'none'; default-src 'none'"
firefox https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-surveillance-countermeasures/687203/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
>This decision was agreed on after a request for comment with more than 200 participants concluded in February 2026, and is due to multiple concerns, including the site using editors' and readers' computers to run a denial-of-service attack and evidence that the website has tampered with some archived pages
The bit about tampering with archived pages is news to me though. Wish the wiki discussion included receipts. Is "two users report they were redirected to tehrantimes.com" what is being referred to when they say archived pages are being tampered with?
And it looks like in some instances they changed their own alias to the name of the blogger they're in dispute with, in a fit of pique.
You have to scroll down to get hints because the conversation has been redacted, and the evidence is not provided with side-by-side comparisons.
I understand the ethical concerns about linking to the site but the blanket accusations of "tampering" seem a bit disingenuous, since no article content was ever changed afaik.
I don't get why they couldn't just say what they did instead of disingenuously implying that article content had been "tampered".
Given the breadth of misinformation out there today, shoddy evidence and misleading language makes people give archive.today the benefit of the doubt, and actually hurts the case against them.
See section "Blog capture tampered with":
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
Also:
> On 20 February 2026, the English Wikipedia banned all links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with: Discussion had discovered that instances of Nora's name were replaced with Patokallio's and that "Nora" was likely an appropriated identity—the name belonged to a real person, whose only connection to archive.today had been a prior content takedown request.[18][17][19] The community's decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability—partly undermined by the discovery of the alterations— while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict.[18][20] Patokallio expressed his satisfaction with the outcome.[3]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Attack_on_Gyrova...
> Specifically, AT's maintainers reportedly tweaked snapshots of a third-party blog post that Patokallio referred to in his February 2026 article about the DDoS attack. AT changed the name of a "Nora" person in said post to Jani Patokallio, making it look as if he had written some comments there. Eagle-eyed Wikipedia editors spotted the alterations, which have since then been reverted, but the action made it easy for them reach a final decision.
* https://www.tomshardware.com/software/search-engines/wikiped...
So there isn't a choice here if you actually want to see the article (without subscribing to the atlantic).
I don't know what's going on behind those 5 buttons, but this was the first, and who knows?
[0] https://www.archivebuttons.com/articles?article=https://www....
@dang, please consider updating.
We don't make a gift link the primary URL because we always want that to be the canonical URL for the article. But it's good to have a variety of options for paywall workarounds.
I think it's very important that people continue to recon with the fact that millions of Germans voted for Hilter and supported his rise to power despite because he wanted to enact antisemitic policies.
He also did a coup, so there's that.
Can you tell us more what you have in mind? Nobody who voted for Hitler in the early 1930 are still alive today.
But also, lower your guard long enough and it might be taken over by any of two or three religious groups that only seem to be growing.
No more “why did I come in this room again?” moments.
What I do know, however, is that most people seem to be willing to give up everything for a little convenience.