Here’s a question I have: every professional meeting I now attend is being recorded & uploaded by seen and unseen AI guests. Even 1:1 conversations between direct managers and colleagues.
That’s a world I don’t want to endorse, but it’s seemingly impossible to opt out and stay employed. Is there anything that I can do to minimize my exposure? Has anyone made it a norm to say “transcription isn’t needed for this meeting so I would like everyone to turn off AI notetaker before we proceed?”
I am part of the problem and recently started turning them on after realizing they were proving to be very useful inputs when using chatbots with connectors to tools that can see the transcripts. It's made scribing notes mostly a ritual and not a practical benefit.
Before I turned it on I asked my team if they had any objections. Silence for eight seconds before saying if anyone was uncomfortable objecting in the group they could reach out to me individually. No one ever did. The only request was that everyone internal get copied on the notes so they could correct them if needed.
These are company decisions to have these connectors and privacy choices. It's their data and their risk. There has never been an illusion that anything said, written, or done at work is private from the company. At home I partake in none of this.
> Before I turned it on I asked my team if they had any objections.
Did you check with internal counsel?
> There has never been an illusion that anything said, written, or done at work is private from the company
The entire industry is one court case away from banning transcription. Not many companies want every word of every meeting legally discoverable - in the past, meetings were used to avoid having a written record. The implications of ubiquitous transcriptions haven't percolated yet, I give 1-3 years (or until the next major case)
This is all of course sanctioned by leadership and the teams who have standing (legal, IT, cybersecurity). Just because something is allowed doesn't mean I'll opt to do it. If I worked somewhere that hasn't been using corporate spyware on all employee laptops and face recognition around the building since long before auto transcription came in vogue I might feel differently about the decision to embrace the surveillance for productivity.
I don't have the authority to make the meaningful decisions, just to do my job efficiently.
Automatic transcripts of online meetings are amazing: it means that you can just shoot the shit for half an hour and then have Claude bang out a deck and MVP for review. And no one has to waste time and attention on making notes.
Even better if it's a feedback session or people have notes and comments. You can have them all mock-implemented before you even send out the summary.
I learned very quickly in my undergraduate days that the act of physically writing down information was the best way for me personally to retain knowledge.
I’ve got over a decade of work experience now and I have like 100 notebooks filled with notes from nearly every day. I routinely find that my own notes differ from auto written transcripts of meetings. Mostly it’s minor things, but every once in a while the automatic transcription gets something critically wrong.
I always used to take notes and casually read minutes out of habit after meetings and pick up on stuff that sounded weird and more and more recently that's been feeling like a superpower to just read things and think through the implications and raise them because people are not picking up on them.
I am horrified of the idea that HR can listen/review every single ~private conversation, that may include frustrations with leadership, family problems, or personal health information that is shared with a trusted manager or coworker, not some HR person.
Except that the summaries can be totally inaccurate. And then people think they have proof that so-and-so said something, when maybe they never said that.
I've been in meeting where people turn off AI notes when real stuff gets discussed and turn it back on after. Seems like a good compromise as long as you trust that it's not going to get logged
Not enough. Many people are running Superwhisper and the like on their machines that capture the audio stream directly out of the OS and applications. Even if all the cloud recorders are removed, you must assume that unless you have the entire security provenance chain of the other person's device verified, that your words are being recorded. And fed to whatever nebulous cloud AI and services that person uses.
Even then, it's easy enough now to have a second device capture the audio, like a phone as well. Being able to reflect on meeting notes is such a powerful valuable thing for people, you can assume they are almost certainly going to be doing it.
The world is becoming dystopian at a rapid pace... These capabilities will be weaponized against people in ways we can't even dream of yet.
We already have products that provide active countermeasures against recording devices, an audio jammer of sorts that renders microphones unable to pick up anything. I wonder how effective they are.
You can still ask. If you're too afraid to even do that, then the alternative is to be guarded during the conversation. But you can choose which path to take.
If someone refuses, then you can frame that it limits candor and vulnerability. If they still prefer to have it on, then you can simply be less open with them.
One problem with this is that it's very easy to think of ways that having a recording of what was said in a meeting might benefit one or more of the participants, by letting them provide evidence later that another participant is lying about what was said in that meeting. An AI recording of a meeting might well protect your interests in court later.
This is not a problem that needs an "AI" solution; small, cheap digital audio recorders have existed for decades and every consumer computer, from smartphones to laptops, has more than adequate udio recording capabilities.
I'm not even talking about a "we didn't computers in my day and we did just fine" old-man-yells-at-cloud objection here; there is no real benefit, wrt recording a meeting, that "AI" brings to the table.
You might reasonably want a text transcript of spoken-language audio from a meeting and any computer technology that can do that is effectively some type of AI. In any case, I don't think there's a principled reason to be okay with every meeting at work being audio-recorded but to suddenly become not okay with it if there's a modern LLM involved doing speech-to-text; unless your actual objection is to LLMs as a technology or to the companies that are currently in the news for selling LLM-based software products.
Hilariously enough the answer is return to the office. I coordinate with my manager to do our 1:1s on days we're both in the office and I know we're not alone.
>>Is there anything that I can do to minimize my exposure?<<
author a study that truthfully demonstrates an increased productivity, and by extension, reduction of costs, that appears in the absence of surveilance.
perhaps an ABC test of production under obvious surveillance, obvious lack of surveillance, and advisement of incidental surveilance at any time.
this should be cross sectional and longitudinal, perhaps an exit survey to categorize the different productivity groups, such as we took longer because we knew we would have to work at a desk under a camera when we were done; vs the we could do it faster because, we knew we wouldnt be nagged about ergonimics, kinefficiency, or surruptitious movements.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
"arbitrary interference with his privacy"
That is tech companies does not have right to private data through data fusion. We humans collectivly have the right to privacy.
A right to privacy the European Convention on Human Rights which every European country other than Belarus is a signatory to. It is directly incorporated into UK law and in all signatory countries appeals can be made to the European Court of Human Rights.
Some governments ignore it, pretty much all governments have tried to find ways to limit the right to privacy. It has not been terribly effective. As far as I can tell constitutional protections in a few countries (like Germany) have been far more effective.
Germany has also lost its right to privacy, with widespread surveillance conducted by police, such as 24/7 in the area surrounding Hamburg main station, and every single protest, and with the police knowing everyone's home address (Anmeldung register), every cellphone being connected with an ID, and every website publicising the home address of the person who wrote it (Impressum). It's not yet total surveillance, more like 80%.
Lately, a German colleague shared with me why they are so focused on privacy. For the dark events that happened in Germany from 1933 to the end of WW2, they used data from a variety of sources that were available at that time. There’s a serious fear (now more than ever in the past) that if an authoritarian regime rose again it would have access to so much data to persecute minorities or even people with different opinions that it would seriously be a nightmare. This puts often overlooked initiatives like GDPR in a completely different light to me.
Interesting that this is the example they've used, as they have a more recent one which was much closer to an oppressive techno-surveillance state (Stasi).
However, I'm not sure how the abuses perpetrated by totalitarian regimes map to regulation such as GDPR, which primarily constrains private entities. Compared to their US counterparts, European governments are not all that more hesitant to use spyware, tap phones, etc. In the same vein, Flock doesn't hold a candle to pervasive camera-based surveillance in the UK.
Don't get me wrong, I think the US should have federal privacy legislation and there's a lot of bad stuff going on in the private sector today, but it's a bit more complicated than "GDPR is there to stop the Nazis". It probably fits better into the general culture of distrusting and regulating private enterprise (maybe for good reasons).
If corporations (public or private) have data the government wants, then the government gets it. This can even be used as a way to circumvent tighter regulations on the government; see Flock for an example.
Secondly, it's the corporations that are paving the way here. Yeah, governments are obviously capable of designing and producing their own tech, but if the corporations have already made it? Than it's so much easier for the government to use it.
Even today different German agencies or public institutions are not linked. If you marry, or get driver's license, you have to fill all kinds of forms, maybe get a birth certificate etc, because they can't just ask a different office to give it to them.
As you said, this is so nobody in government can collect all kinds of data about citizens, to do bad things to them.
Some people would like to have, say, a public wealth register today, and the above is exactly why others heavily oppose those ideas.
Good observation and I agree that the German situation is more nuanced, even if it’s not perceived as such.
GP’s argument applies to the design of German state bureaucracy. E.g there exist no unified German identification number but several for different purposes (tax, pension etc.). This is directly motivated from the Nazi regime as GP told us. That’s also why the Stasi is not often cited as an argument because the GDR developed in parallel with the West German state.
I would say that these precautions are not enough to prevent a 21st century authoritarian regime from rising and using data. Most of the interesting data is in the hand of privatized public places (social media). We can see these issues already happening with ICE in the US
> they have a more recent one which was much closer to an oppressive techno-surveillance state (Stasi).
The Stasi were low-tech card catalogs and blackmail.
The Nazis used IBM, and digitized census data that had already been collected and was just there to be used.* Places without extensive census data are where Jews survived. Plenty of people didn't even know they were "Jewish" until the Nazis told them.
It absolutely maps to GDPR. I bet that if you pulled a few good sources of private data, you could map every single e.g. homosexual in the US, with few false positives or negatives. This could still happen if we passed a privacy law tomorrow, and only used data collected until today.
The odds are very much non-zero that this will happen. It should be illegal to collect and trade in massive collections of dossiers on US citizens. The government can just buy them. Weird how we could see it as bad when it was anti-Chinese propaganda about "social credit," but Americans don't know that it's illegal in just about every country in the world to collect and make decisions based on dragnet "credit ratings" like we do here.
The problem with GDPR is that Europeans don't control anything; and they don't really make rights, they make guidelines that they call "rights" but that they can break whenever they want or whenever they want to buy American. GDPR is just a restraint on Europeans, nobody else has to care, and European companies and governments can just buy the info they want about their own populations from Americans who will be happy to sell it to them.
Sorry for being ignorant from the other side. What else did you thought GDPR and privacy in general is about, if not to prevent powerful entities from (automatically) messing with your life?
GDPR is a great initiative. However it doesn’t prevent big tech from buying politicians, manipulating people or collecting massive data from individuals.
Look up 'list of gdpr fines in eu country'. For some reason, where I am, a lot of Mayors are fined (as individuals), and also their municipalities as 'entities'.
Also, the national elecricity company has been fined, in various areas, various amounts from 1k up (guess who pays the entity fine?)
> This puts often overlooked initiatives like GDPR in a completely different light to me.
The problem with initiatives like GDPR is that they don't actually solve the problem. If you're worried about the SS then a law that tries to tell companies what they can do with some data is totally useless, because the thing you need is for the companies to not have the data.
If Apple can run code as root on every iPhone then when the SS comes, the SS can run code as root on every iPhone. They go to Apple and put a gun to their head, or infiltrate the company with operatives, and then do what they please with the central control the company already holds.
To prevent that you need to change the architecture of the systems in popular use to remove central chokepoints that authoritarians could use for censorship and surveillance. But none of those initiatives have accomplished that, and most of them don't even attempt it, even though that's the thing you'd need them to do.
You need "no chokepoints" to be the pre-existing default when the baddies come so that when they try to change it, people can already see why they shouldn't and refuse to give up the existing systems without it. Instead of needing to develop those systems only after the need arises, and then needing to do it under a hostile regime which is meanwhile using the existing systems to commit atrocities.
This UN declaration doesn’t seem to establish an enduring definition of privacy.
Hayek offers a significant observation that things that work among small orders, like a family, don’t work when applied to a whole city. It speaks to the gap between a single police officer seeing something and a city-wide camera crime detection network.
Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or say our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. [Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit]
Many people believe the UN is supposed to be one world government, and is failing at that purpose. It is certainly not achieving that purpose. However, that is not its purpose.
There is no other solution here if you want to both participate in the modern economy and preserve some semblance of privacy, and even then some idiot somewhere will leak your medical records or family photos.
1. A public profile that is your real self.
2. Throwaway identities.
3. Air gaps
4. EFF[1], IJ, or EPIC membership
[1]EFF is a serious organization, but I would happily pay their $1k or even $5k membership tiers if they ran a larger, more concentrated pipeline of affirmative lawsuits like FIRE and ACLU do. Hire liberty-minded sharks to find bad laws, find plaintiffs, file challenges across jurisdictions, and keep a large docket moving continuously.
For what it's worth IJ and EPIC do this well, but EFF has a bigger profile and the technical bench to make this approach highly effective.
If the OG Google Glass got so much backlash 10 years ago, why should the current crop of recording products face any less hostility when they all pose the same privacy problem?
"We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,"
This is a quote from an internal Meta memo about how they would plan the launch of these creepy glasses. There are too many crises that seem more pressing to a lot of people.
There is already a big backlash with these glasses, they've become colloquially known as "perv glasses" and it's been proposed to make them illegal to use in some places!
Yeah I don't think I like the idea of someone wearing them and looking at me. They can just paint or tape over the privacy light.
There is a path forward though. If they can strip out pictures of people and PII by default from video feed and enforce explicit consent(digitally). People might be open to adopting it. I think only apple kind of has any where near that level of trust.
I think a biggest belief that tech people have in pilled circles at Meta and Google is that " this is amazing why would people not use it?" is dead.
It does not matter if you trust them as long as non technical people do. Because HN crowd is less than 1% or people. People trust apple way more than meta.
I think it's more a case of the HN crowd trusts Apple way more than Meta.
Meta has ~3.5 billion users while Apple has ~2.5 billion users and Meta is one of their top app developers, which suggests people trust both of these companies way more than they should.
Agreed, dozens of countries rely on Facebook for even government. Plenty of EU countries for example assume WhatsApp to a point where it's practically non-negotiable if you want to participate in the economy at all.
You trust Meta to do this unfailingly, without making an exception for themselves which you will consent to somwhere in a 30 page user agreement or a dark pattern in the UI?
That goes against the very soul of their being as demonstrated by everything they've done to date.
If meta actually wanted to sell consumer electronics to people. They have no choice but to actually compete with apple and apple will beat them in the poll "would you buy this exactly same ___ device from Apple or Meta?" at least today in 2026.
I think there are many reasons some but not all imo:
- The price difference. Calling a person who dropped $1,500 on a "tech glasses" in 2013 a glasshole made sense. It felt like someone with more money than sense. Meta glasses are $299 today that's just small gadget money so there is no "too much money, little sense" aspect
- Tech went 100% mainstream. It wasn't exactly an exclusively nerdy or geeky thing in 2013 anymore like the 90s or early 2000s, but there was still certain "Too much tech means you are a socially incompetent neckbeard". Today the biggest socialites online often do a tech haul style videos about the latest tech gadgets they got.
- Cameras exploded everywhere. Everyone has watched footage from Ring, GoPro, traffic lights, security cams, court cams, dashcams, police body cams, etc. Plenty of regular people got home cameras too and find it very useful to keep an eye on pets, backyards, etc. Plenty of very regular people have stories about how their cameras saved their ass in one occasion or another. There has been plenty of high-profile news stories about how a Tesla or a Ring camera helped solve a crime or catch a horrific murder or criminal.
- The proliferation of prank YouTubers in the 2010s. Even though most of them were paid actors, going out and acting as a douch and recording it became a mainstream. Kids love it, and despite the "backlash" they were getting millions regardless
- It doesn't matter how you feel about meta glasses or google glasses, you will have reports online of people who tell you how those products changed their life for the better because it helped them overcome some adversity, or protected them in a victim situation or literally saved their life in some situation
For some reason in the last ten years, people have gone from being critical of corporations to favoring them. I think these companies have become so huge, and they have gotten away with so much, that people have resigned themselves to being at their mercy.
Really? I agree that many are resigned, but I see much more skepticism of everything Big Tech companies do today than there was during the Obama administration.
Although, this chart suggests that Google’s popularity hasn’t changed much, which is a bit surprising:
I think there has been a growing failure in identifying fake opinions and accounts from real ones. Who's checking that the people you are engaging with are real, aren't AI or LLMs hired by some 3rd party agency to manufacture opinion about some company or cause?
At the time there were two camps: tech-optimists who saw the value in a device that brought the power of the internet on top of your view of the world, and the other camp who worried about privacy or the "creep factor" and believed that outweighed any potential benefit.
When Google Glass came out that latter group had more sway culturally and more political power to ban such things. They don't have that as much anymore but that could swing back in their favor again
"Tech optimists" is an extremely kind term here. The other group was 'worried about the creep factor' because their opposition were the creeps. This is still the case today.
It is a generational thing. Gen Z grew up with an internet where it was normalized to share your complete life online, create posts under your real identity, and so on. Give it 1 - 2 generations, and perv glasses will be seen as not intrusive.
Gen Z (and Alpha for that matter) very carefully curate their online lives. There is a distinct and appreciable difference between how they act when there are visible cameras and when there are not.
The kids are savvy.
In other words, I disagree with you. I think they'll be more likely to use them, but only under very particular circumstances.
>Gen Z grew up with an internet where it was normalized to share your complete life online
I don't see that. Social media seems to be a Millenial phenomenon. Gen Z hates the internet despite using it. Gen Z uses nicknames rather than real names. Gen Z prefers private chatrooms to the exhibitionism of Facebook
Gen Z is very opposed to perv glasses tbh and we are not generally speaking the same kind of "tech optimists" that prior generations often were. I think you've got your generational stereotypes a little off.
A decade ago, I would have said that's an individual person problem. Though these companies don't understand the word "No" and have already pushed the boundaries to the point that they're all in collusion with each other, resulting in broken privacy.
At least US-side, nothing will change until people start holding their representatives accountable and start voting for people that will actually do something about it.
This wont happen anytime soon, we have a much bigger problem we're dealing with for the next two years.
> nothing will change until people start holding their representatives accountable
Which itself won't change. The term for holding representatives accountable is "lobbying", which the public believes is an abhorrent act!
> and start voting for people that will actually do something about it.
The thing is, who wins an election matters little. There are always exceptions, and we've definitely seen exceptions, but most representatives are there in good faith. However, they are not mind readers. They can't do anything aligned to the people until the people start lobbying to make it known what they want — but the people won't do that because it is seen as abhorrent behavior.
> This wont happen anytime soon
Especially when appears likely that those companies are responsible for making the people believe that it is unacceptable to lobby. They have the marketing budgets and know-how to keep pushing that narrative until the end of time.
I could be wrong. Like when you're dumb enough to eliminate large swaths of the workforce, especially technologically skilled workers, you're risking these people using these same technologies to vote you out.
People know how to game the algorithms presented to them, so it's not as simple as having ad-bucks anymore.
> The term for holding representatives accountable is "lobbying", which the public believes is an abhorrent act!
That’s a misrepresentation. You see plenty of exhortations to “call your representative”, which technically could be called lobbying, but that’s not what people find problematic. The issue is professional lobbying, which involves people paid to lobby, and often involves money or other incentives for the representative being lobbied. This kind of lobbying is not actually focused on holding representatives accountable, but rather on changing their positions.
As such, the above quote really doesn’t have much bearing on how much the public holds, or wants to hold, representatives accountable.
No matter how much you try to apologize it away the reality remains that the public abhors talking to their representatives. According to the 2016 US census on behaviour, only 10% of the public do. Which, conveniently, is exactly the same proportion of the population whose livelihood comes from ownership of a business. You're right to point out that business lobbying doesn't have the same stigma (or more likely when survival is on the line you stop caring about what other people think), but I think the earlier commenter already recognized that.
See also: "We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back." - Jean Claude Juncker
The issues around privacy are inherent in an internet that is paid for by targeted advertising. If there is privacy there is no way to pay the small amounts for email for example.
If we want privacy, we need an alternative business model.
The Internet was in many ways a better place before data capitalism came along so the likes of Google and Facebook could monetise.
We had email and it worked just fine. You got an account via your ISP or paid a small amount for a separate service and perhaps a custom domain that you controlled yourself. Centralising this with the likes of Google is not progress.
We had more content than anyone could ever consume in a lifetime on the Web even back then. It was mostly created by people interested in sharing for personal satisfaction and perhaps the enjoyment of a good discussion that followed or by organisations that benefitted from sharing that information freely. It wasn't done with a direct profit motive based on metrics like page views. We didn't have endless AI spam designed to host endless auctioned ad spots diluting the good stuff.
So here's my proposed privacy-friendly alternative business model: You don't get to harvest personal data for reasons unrelated to whatever products or services you're providing to willing consumers and if you do then we throw you in jail. I'm pretty sure the Internet would find a way to continue providing the functionality that is actually useful. I'm pretty sure the signal/noise ratio online would be much better too.
Civil damages can become merely a "cost of doing business".
Jail time for the responsible executives makes it personal for the decision makers. Obviously there still needs to be due process. It would be sensible to have stages where there are clear warnings given by the relevant regulators with indications of the specific remediation actions required and then a reasonable amount of time to actually implement that remediation before anyone is getting carted off in handcuffs for non-compliance.
I am not generally in favour of piercing the corporate veil but in cases of flagrant and deliberate disregard for the law I think there is a point where it becomes justified and perhaps even necessary.
I see the point. My misgiving is that jail time means the government can just refrain from enforcing it because the leaders have found favor with one another.
A data breach of 10 million records, times $10k per offense, might not deter Google, but it would raise the eyebrows of smaller violators. An industry of class action lawyers might emerge to specialize in those claims.
No. The only solve is to start voting and voting for people that actually fix these problems instead of bowing to corporate interests over people interests.
it would be interesting to see if the "camera light has been tampered with" 'privacy mechanism' could be remotely triggered by some carefully timed application of electromagnetic energy pulses ;)
Well, cell signal jammers are illegal. I could see the possibility of something like a Meta-produced device that could be set to disable recording by Meta glasses in the vicinity. That seems different in scope. But lol on that.
> ...while they also expect the owners of these devices to use them responsibly and to notify those around them of their capabilities to act within whatever laws their states may have.
Hell, no. They expect you to act as uninformed and oblivious about it as possible so they can scrape the maximum amount of data while the liability is all yours.
Exactly this. Anyone who wears these smart glasses are just selling themselves for a negative return. Like meta should be giving these glasses away given how much data they harvest. Instead they convince rubes and pervs to actually pay for it.
Someone should invest some serious money for a big ad campaign that explains the state of privacy of 2026 to people. From online tracking and fingerprinting to cars and street cameras etc.
Governments could do it. Or tv stations.. (“the more you know..”)
Tell it like it is and perhaps fewer will elect to consume crazy conspiracy theories. And instead make better life choices.
Give it time. I am sure the Israelis, the Ukrainians, and the Russians will be world leaders in this type of jamming technology I have a feeling infrared light jamming cameras and sound frequencies beyond human hearing are going to be key components of this new technology. I’m ready, and so is my checkbook.
As a passive sensor, cameras are essentially undetectable at-range and requires a dangerous and likely illegal amount of directed energy to disable or damage.
The proliferation of battlefield EOTS has made this sort of system a real priority, but we have no anti-radiation defenses against passive sensors. It's likely that a civilian system in that vein will never exist, let alone a military option.
Sadly that's not the case, or at least not in Germany. A judge actually refused to block the sale of the glasses because it was considered that the LED were sufficient warning. Sure, you can still use them covertly and releasing material often requires a waiver, but that's true of smartphones too.
There's a case right now (brought forward by the HateAid organization) arguing that these types of glasses should be forbidden, but I'm not optimistic that they'll succeed.
Expected an anti nuisance streamer app by now. Just playing ad reels and copyrighted music above and below human hearing levels. Since algo bots will usually scan that high/low and bury videos for whatever is considered an infraction.
People in Europe install surveillance cameras all over and threaten with the police when you tell them you don't consent being recorded. When you go to the police reporting the cameras, the police tells you to get a lawyer and open a civil case.
So on the contrary I'd say... you want cameras? We'll go all in.
Depends which Europe, I know its popular US view to treat us as 1 monolithic country but we are anything but that. In Switzerland for example its strictly forbidden to record people privately without their consent, and good luck dealing with Swiss police on spot, they are not that kind to such assholism.
I'm a little disappointed to see this article make no distinction between Apple implementing hard technical barriers between them and your data, plus very detailed technical white papers describing many of the barriers they implement, and Facebook offering some virtual settings that let you feel slightly differently while they use your data either way. Are those really the same thing?
I feel like Apple has the best track record, in general, of detailing exactly what security measures they actually use to protect your data. Other companies are just like, trust me bro. Literally like every other company is like that.
In my view, this is precisely the kind of water-carrying that has led to the incremental erosion of our privacy in the first place. It happened little by little, enabled by opinions like this, who say "well at least foo is doing it in a more privacy-preserving way than bar", and each additional little erosion, each pebble on the beach newly washed away, is built on top of this new expectation, rather than the old status quo.
Go back ten years, and compare to today, and tell me whether we as a society would be happy with that difference occurring overnight. We wouldn't. But we let it happen over 500 odd weeks, with a new intrusion each week built on top of the last.
I reject the premise. They are functionally the same over a longer time span, but only Apple wins plaudits for it. They are as guilty as the rest of them.
> US Constituion understands privacy as self-sovereignty. As in I am the boss of me.
It doesn't. The Bill of Rights does, and it was pushed by the anti-federalists. It is also constantly eroded, and the entire package put together in the context of slavery, a group of people born with no rights. It certainly doesn't have an opinion about whether you have an intellectual property right over facts about yourself.
The Constitution isn't a metaphysical document that can be confused by this sort of psychedelic reasoning about some sort of natural property rights. It is a document that is enforced by Congress and the Judiciary. If they both agree that you shouldn't have any privacy, you won't have any privacy. Neither have been restraining the Executive since 9/11; and they've only barely restraining the states and local municipalities, and not always in a good way.
Your privacy rights come from the psychedelic reasoning of the Judiciary, and can be taken away if they switch drug preferences. It has been decided that privacy rights are written in shadows* cast by the constitution. Really. And only since 1965 - you might be older than your constitutional privacy rights.
I've read that article before. I've worked on both voter and patient privacy, so have thought about privacy well enough for a layperson. IANAL, obviously.
We don't have the explicit right to vote either. Is that a problem? I don't know. Though I favor the notion that since we had to vote the Constitution into law, the right to vote is an unstated precursor (or whatever lawyerly language applies).
So it is with privacy. Privacy is a modern term. But the founders were certainly against unlawful search and seizure, compelled testimony, etc. Quacks like a duck...
I'll concede that, with a few exceptions, SCOTUS has historically been actively hostile towards individual rights.
EFF is onto something HN is not generally on the right side of this. The hacker community, to my observation, is deeply divided. Cynically, I think half of hackers have become dissociative and mildly sociopathic in terms of their views of technology.
Tech should benefit people and be open, and trillionaire are not a healthy long term indicator in a stable society.
I didn’t read the post. I didn’t have to. They wanna shift it to you have no privacy anywhere at any time correct?
The tech companies leading the charge are mainly the ad companies in short, the companies that have a cost of acquisition because most people do not and will not buy anything from them and in most cases never will ie.. Facebook, Google and soon the AI model makers.
If you are about to comment on it, why not read the article? Why leave it to chance whether your contribution will be signal or noise?
In the article, EEF discusses the currently emerging issue of not being able to consent to other people's always-on wearable technology in the context of the broader problem of our diminishing ability to speak openly. It ends with a clear message on how to oppose such developments in a constructive, meaningful way.
Tech companies respond to incentives. If the technology exists to create and sell devices that are useful to people and legal, then they'll do it, and people will buy and use them. And that is fantastic - I'm great with tech companies making tools that makes my life easier. I absolutely plan on using the heck out of the next wave of AR glasses for digitizing historical documents so I can have both hands free instad of holding a phone in one. Better audio recording devices? Yes, please.
Simultaneously - I own my words, either written or spoken. This isn't really all that different from copyright, and I'm rather surprised we don't more regularly bring that reasoning to bear on this issue. If I give them to you in a private conversation, then those words are for you to hear. If you record them without my consent, then you're violating my (copy)right. If a company takes those words without my consent, then that company is violating my copyright.
I don't know exactly what should happen to people and companies violating my copyright, but I do remember when it was the other way around a few years back and the RIAA was getting people fined thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per incident. That seems about right.
> Simultaneously - I own my words, either written or spoken. This isn't really all that different from copyright, and I'm rather surprised we don't more regularly bring that reasoning to bear on this issue. If I give them to you in a private conversation, then those words are for you to hear. If you record them without my consent, then you're violating my (copy)right. If a company takes those words without my consent, then that company is violating my copyright.
The copyright situation is interesting, at least under US law, because is most cases where someone on the street records you speaking you will not copyright. That's because of a loophole in the way the copyright statute works.
People commonly believe that when the US changed from copyright coming into existence when you register your work they switched to it coming into existence as soon as your create the work, but that is not correct. 17 USC 102(a) tells us that copyright subsists in works that are
>> [...] fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
But what does it mean to be "fixed" in a tangible medium of expression? For that we must turn to 17 USC 101:
>> A work is “fixed” in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration.
Their recording of you is not "by or under the authority of the author" so is not a fixation, so your work is not copyrighted yet.
Congress recognized this loophole and partly closed it in 1994, with 17 USC 1101, which is titled "Unauthorized fixation and trafficking in sound recordings and music videos". This closes it in the case where you are, say, a street musician and someone records your song which is not yet copyrighted because you have not yet recorded it or written down the sheet music or tab. It gives such a musician essentially the same rights and remedies they would have if they had copyright.
But that is explicitly for music. Unless you start singing everything you say in public it won't help you. Even if you do that, those devices that just immediately transcribe what they hear probably would not be covered, because no matter how creative a melody you come up with to sing "I'll have a medium Big Mac meal with a coke please" to, they will just be recording your lyrics. US requires a certain level of creativity in a work for it to be copyrightable and "I'll have a medium Big Mac meal with a coke please" is probably not going to make the cut.
You best defense, if you want to have a chance of federal copyright applying, is to wear something of your own that records you. Then your words are fixed under the authority of the author (you) as soon as you speak them, and so if they do meet the bar for being copyrightable they will be copyrighted.
There is also state common-law copyright law to consider. Federal copyright law preempts state copyright law, and with it so easy to get federal copyright you don't really tend to hear much about state copyright law.
However, that loophole that makes federal copyright law not attach also makes it so state copyright law is not preempted for works that fall into the federal loophole. State common law copyright tends to be more generous or expansive than federal copyright, so this is probably your best copyright bet.
This suggests that you may want to actually avoid recording yourself, to avoid any chance of getting federal copyright and thus having state common law copyright law preempted.
I did a little searching, and apparently whether you should record yourself or not has been debated and analyzed in other contexts like stand-up comedy performances and public lectures.
> There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces.
As always, scale matters, as does the purpose of the surveillance and the affiliation of the surveilling party. This comment of mine from last month (and the document linked in the footnote) will be good reading for you. [0] Also keep in mind that private entities can be legally considered to be agents of the State... depending on how they and the State are conducting themselves.
> *Apple is an EFF donor. EFF donors do not influence our agenda or our positions.
Oh sure, otherwise why would you emphasize over and over again that Apple makes it harder for law enforcement to extract private data of an individual?
Here’s a question I have: every professional meeting I now attend is being recorded & uploaded by seen and unseen AI guests. Even 1:1 conversations between direct managers and colleagues.
That’s a world I don’t want to endorse, but it’s seemingly impossible to opt out and stay employed. Is there anything that I can do to minimize my exposure? Has anyone made it a norm to say “transcription isn’t needed for this meeting so I would like everyone to turn off AI notetaker before we proceed?”
I am part of the problem and recently started turning them on after realizing they were proving to be very useful inputs when using chatbots with connectors to tools that can see the transcripts. It's made scribing notes mostly a ritual and not a practical benefit.
Before I turned it on I asked my team if they had any objections. Silence for eight seconds before saying if anyone was uncomfortable objecting in the group they could reach out to me individually. No one ever did. The only request was that everyone internal get copied on the notes so they could correct them if needed.
These are company decisions to have these connectors and privacy choices. It's their data and their risk. There has never been an illusion that anything said, written, or done at work is private from the company. At home I partake in none of this.
> Before I turned it on I asked my team if they had any objections.
Did you check with internal counsel?
> There has never been an illusion that anything said, written, or done at work is private from the company
The entire industry is one court case away from banning transcription. Not many companies want every word of every meeting legally discoverable - in the past, meetings were used to avoid having a written record. The implications of ubiquitous transcriptions haven't percolated yet, I give 1-3 years (or until the next major case)
This is all of course sanctioned by leadership and the teams who have standing (legal, IT, cybersecurity). Just because something is allowed doesn't mean I'll opt to do it. If I worked somewhere that hasn't been using corporate spyware on all employee laptops and face recognition around the building since long before auto transcription came in vogue I might feel differently about the decision to embrace the surveillance for productivity.
I don't have the authority to make the meaningful decisions, just to do my job efficiently.
I'm surprised lawyers aren't jumping all over this, not with you specifically, just generically everywhere.
Casual meetings can have misconstrued words.
What’s the legal theory here?
Someone sues, and stuff comes out in discovery.
Automatic transcripts of online meetings are amazing: it means that you can just shoot the shit for half an hour and then have Claude bang out a deck and MVP for review. And no one has to waste time and attention on making notes.
Even better if it's a feedback session or people have notes and comments. You can have them all mock-implemented before you even send out the summary.
Taking notes works your brain, helps your memory, and strengthens understanding.
I learned very quickly in my undergraduate days that the act of physically writing down information was the best way for me personally to retain knowledge.
I’ve got over a decade of work experience now and I have like 100 notebooks filled with notes from nearly every day. I routinely find that my own notes differ from auto written transcripts of meetings. Mostly it’s minor things, but every once in a while the automatic transcription gets something critically wrong.
I always used to take notes and casually read minutes out of habit after meetings and pick up on stuff that sounded weird and more and more recently that's been feeling like a superpower to just read things and think through the implications and raise them because people are not picking up on them.
I am horrified of the idea that HR can listen/review every single ~private conversation, that may include frustrations with leadership, family problems, or personal health information that is shared with a trusted manager or coworker, not some HR person.
Then these changes are actually a good thing because you get the opportunity to learn that they've had that power for years.
Except that the summaries can be totally inaccurate. And then people think they have proof that so-and-so said something, when maybe they never said that.
I've been in meeting where people turn off AI notes when real stuff gets discussed and turn it back on after. Seems like a good compromise as long as you trust that it's not going to get logged
Its obviously getting logged
> Even 1:1 conversations between direct managers and colleagues.
You can ask someone to turn it off.
Not enough. Many people are running Superwhisper and the like on their machines that capture the audio stream directly out of the OS and applications. Even if all the cloud recorders are removed, you must assume that unless you have the entire security provenance chain of the other person's device verified, that your words are being recorded. And fed to whatever nebulous cloud AI and services that person uses.
Even then, it's easy enough now to have a second device capture the audio, like a phone as well. Being able to reflect on meeting notes is such a powerful valuable thing for people, you can assume they are almost certainly going to be doing it.
The world is becoming dystopian at a rapid pace... These capabilities will be weaponized against people in ways we can't even dream of yet.
We already have products that provide active countermeasures against recording devices, an audio jammer of sorts that renders microphones unable to pick up anything. I wonder how effective they are.
Its often seen as an imposition to do so, so it depends on how the power structure runs if someone is comfortable asking
You can still ask. If you're too afraid to even do that, then the alternative is to be guarded during the conversation. But you can choose which path to take.
Really? In my everyday people always ask "Is it okay for my/our notetaker to join the meeting?"
Might be a German/European thing though...
Yes I do this constantly? It has never been an issue.
Yeah, if they refuse then that is also a signal about how much they truly value you (and not an insignificant one either).
If someone refuses, then you can frame that it limits candor and vulnerability. If they still prefer to have it on, then you can simply be less open with them.
Get your coworkers together and form a union.
I'm not even kidding. An individual has no protection, if it's workplace policy you can be fired for not following it.
If employees collectively challenge the policy an employer can not legally retaliate against collective action.
One problem with this is that it's very easy to think of ways that having a recording of what was said in a meeting might benefit one or more of the participants, by letting them provide evidence later that another participant is lying about what was said in that meeting. An AI recording of a meeting might well protect your interests in court later.
This is not a problem that needs an "AI" solution; small, cheap digital audio recorders have existed for decades and every consumer computer, from smartphones to laptops, has more than adequate udio recording capabilities.
I'm not even talking about a "we didn't computers in my day and we did just fine" old-man-yells-at-cloud objection here; there is no real benefit, wrt recording a meeting, that "AI" brings to the table.
You might reasonably want a text transcript of spoken-language audio from a meeting and any computer technology that can do that is effectively some type of AI. In any case, I don't think there's a principled reason to be okay with every meeting at work being audio-recorded but to suddenly become not okay with it if there's a modern LLM involved doing speech-to-text; unless your actual objection is to LLMs as a technology or to the companies that are currently in the news for selling LLM-based software products.
It's fine, a leak of your meeting to a potential competitor could result in as much as another meeting. ;-(
Hilariously enough the answer is return to the office. I coordinate with my manager to do our 1:1s on days we're both in the office and I know we're not alone.
>>Is there anything that I can do to minimize my exposure?<<
author a study that truthfully demonstrates an increased productivity, and by extension, reduction of costs, that appears in the absence of surveilance.
perhaps an ABC test of production under obvious surveillance, obvious lack of surveillance, and advisement of incidental surveilance at any time. this should be cross sectional and longitudinal, perhaps an exit survey to categorize the different productivity groups, such as we took longer because we knew we would have to work at a desk under a camera when we were done; vs the we could do it faster because, we knew we wouldnt be nagged about ergonimics, kinefficiency, or surruptitious movements.
UN Human right article 12
"Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
"arbitrary interference with his privacy"
That is tech companies does not have right to private data through data fusion. We humans collectivly have the right to privacy.
A right to privacy the European Convention on Human Rights which every European country other than Belarus is a signatory to. It is directly incorporated into UK law and in all signatory countries appeals can be made to the European Court of Human Rights.
Some governments ignore it, pretty much all governments have tried to find ways to limit the right to privacy. It has not been terribly effective. As far as I can tell constitutional protections in a few countries (like Germany) have been far more effective.
Germany has also lost its right to privacy, with widespread surveillance conducted by police, such as 24/7 in the area surrounding Hamburg main station, and every single protest, and with the police knowing everyone's home address (Anmeldung register), every cellphone being connected with an ID, and every website publicising the home address of the person who wrote it (Impressum). It's not yet total surveillance, more like 80%.
A right is like a trademark. It must be defended, or it loses its power.
Lately, a German colleague shared with me why they are so focused on privacy. For the dark events that happened in Germany from 1933 to the end of WW2, they used data from a variety of sources that were available at that time. There’s a serious fear (now more than ever in the past) that if an authoritarian regime rose again it would have access to so much data to persecute minorities or even people with different opinions that it would seriously be a nightmare. This puts often overlooked initiatives like GDPR in a completely different light to me.
You don't have to look to the past to see that in action, ICE and the DOJ have used social media and every government database they can to do this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennkarte
Germany still has this btw. For everyone.
The desire to do that by people in power is always there. It's just latent until new tech comes along that can achieve it.
Interesting that this is the example they've used, as they have a more recent one which was much closer to an oppressive techno-surveillance state (Stasi).
However, I'm not sure how the abuses perpetrated by totalitarian regimes map to regulation such as GDPR, which primarily constrains private entities. Compared to their US counterparts, European governments are not all that more hesitant to use spyware, tap phones, etc. In the same vein, Flock doesn't hold a candle to pervasive camera-based surveillance in the UK.
Don't get me wrong, I think the US should have federal privacy legislation and there's a lot of bad stuff going on in the private sector today, but it's a bit more complicated than "GDPR is there to stop the Nazis". It probably fits better into the general culture of distrusting and regulating private enterprise (maybe for good reasons).
I view it as another facet of policy.
If corporations (public or private) have data the government wants, then the government gets it. This can even be used as a way to circumvent tighter regulations on the government; see Flock for an example.
Secondly, it's the corporations that are paving the way here. Yeah, governments are obviously capable of designing and producing their own tech, but if the corporations have already made it? Than it's so much easier for the government to use it.
Even today different German agencies or public institutions are not linked. If you marry, or get driver's license, you have to fill all kinds of forms, maybe get a birth certificate etc, because they can't just ask a different office to give it to them.
As you said, this is so nobody in government can collect all kinds of data about citizens, to do bad things to them.
Some people would like to have, say, a public wealth register today, and the above is exactly why others heavily oppose those ideas.
Good observation and I agree that the German situation is more nuanced, even if it’s not perceived as such.
GP’s argument applies to the design of German state bureaucracy. E.g there exist no unified German identification number but several for different purposes (tax, pension etc.). This is directly motivated from the Nazi regime as GP told us. That’s also why the Stasi is not often cited as an argument because the GDR developed in parallel with the West German state.
I would say that these precautions are not enough to prevent a 21st century authoritarian regime from rising and using data. Most of the interesting data is in the hand of privatized public places (social media). We can see these issues already happening with ICE in the US
> they have a more recent one which was much closer to an oppressive techno-surveillance state (Stasi).
The Stasi were low-tech card catalogs and blackmail.
The Nazis used IBM, and digitized census data that had already been collected and was just there to be used.* Places without extensive census data are where Jews survived. Plenty of people didn't even know they were "Jewish" until the Nazis told them.
It absolutely maps to GDPR. I bet that if you pulled a few good sources of private data, you could map every single e.g. homosexual in the US, with few false positives or negatives. This could still happen if we passed a privacy law tomorrow, and only used data collected until today.
The odds are very much non-zero that this will happen. It should be illegal to collect and trade in massive collections of dossiers on US citizens. The government can just buy them. Weird how we could see it as bad when it was anti-Chinese propaganda about "social credit," but Americans don't know that it's illegal in just about every country in the world to collect and make decisions based on dragnet "credit ratings" like we do here.
The problem with GDPR is that Europeans don't control anything; and they don't really make rights, they make guidelines that they call "rights" but that they can break whenever they want or whenever they want to buy American. GDPR is just a restraint on Europeans, nobody else has to care, and European companies and governments can just buy the info they want about their own populations from Americans who will be happy to sell it to them.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Sorry for being ignorant from the other side. What else did you thought GDPR and privacy in general is about, if not to prevent powerful entities from (automatically) messing with your life?
GDPR is a great initiative. However it doesn’t prevent big tech from buying politicians, manipulating people or collecting massive data from individuals.
Look up 'list of gdpr fines in eu country'. For some reason, where I am, a lot of Mayors are fined (as individuals), and also their municipalities as 'entities'. Also, the national elecricity company has been fined, in various areas, various amounts from 1k up (guess who pays the entity fine?)
.. in what sense is the GRPR overlooked?
> This puts often overlooked initiatives like GDPR in a completely different light to me.
The problem with initiatives like GDPR is that they don't actually solve the problem. If you're worried about the SS then a law that tries to tell companies what they can do with some data is totally useless, because the thing you need is for the companies to not have the data.
If Apple can run code as root on every iPhone then when the SS comes, the SS can run code as root on every iPhone. They go to Apple and put a gun to their head, or infiltrate the company with operatives, and then do what they please with the central control the company already holds.
To prevent that you need to change the architecture of the systems in popular use to remove central chokepoints that authoritarians could use for censorship and surveillance. But none of those initiatives have accomplished that, and most of them don't even attempt it, even though that's the thing you'd need them to do.
You need "no chokepoints" to be the pre-existing default when the baddies come so that when they try to change it, people can already see why they shouldn't and refuse to give up the existing systems without it. Instead of needing to develop those systems only after the need arises, and then needing to do it under a hostile regime which is meanwhile using the existing systems to commit atrocities.
Is this binding on and inside every member country?
the real UN has no more power than the model UN high schoolers role play
It would be good then to see the laws in each country.
If you are in a country which has some decent legal system and institutions.
And even then it’s a crap shoot
This UN declaration doesn’t seem to establish an enduring definition of privacy.
Hayek offers a significant observation that things that work among small orders, like a family, don’t work when applied to a whole city. It speaks to the gap between a single police officer seeing something and a city-wide camera crime detection network.
The UN, a global entity that isn’t worth the paper its existence it’s written on. Probably the best ever example of the term “paper tiger”
Many people believe the UN is supposed to be one world government, and is failing at that purpose. It is certainly not achieving that purpose. However, that is not its purpose.
There is no other solution here if you want to both participate in the modern economy and preserve some semblance of privacy, and even then some idiot somewhere will leak your medical records or family photos.
1. A public profile that is your real self.
2. Throwaway identities.
3. Air gaps
4. EFF[1], IJ, or EPIC membership
[1]EFF is a serious organization, but I would happily pay their $1k or even $5k membership tiers if they ran a larger, more concentrated pipeline of affirmative lawsuits like FIRE and ACLU do. Hire liberty-minded sharks to find bad laws, find plaintiffs, file challenges across jurisdictions, and keep a large docket moving continuously.
For what it's worth IJ and EPIC do this well, but EFF has a bigger profile and the technical bench to make this approach highly effective.
If the OG Google Glass got so much backlash 10 years ago, why should the current crop of recording products face any less hostility when they all pose the same privacy problem?
"We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,"
This is a quote from an internal Meta memo about how they would plan the launch of these creepy glasses. There are too many crises that seem more pressing to a lot of people.
Source for the quote: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...
This is a domestic enemy. Send the military in against them. Drag them from their homes and throw them in Gitmo.
unhinged
There is already a big backlash with these glasses, they've become colloquially known as "perv glasses" and it's been proposed to make them illegal to use in some places!
Yeah I don't think I like the idea of someone wearing them and looking at me. They can just paint or tape over the privacy light.
There is a path forward though. If they can strip out pictures of people and PII by default from video feed and enforce explicit consent(digitally). People might be open to adopting it. I think only apple kind of has any where near that level of trust.
I think a biggest belief that tech people have in pilled circles at Meta and Google is that " this is amazing why would people not use it?" is dead.
> I think only apple kind of has any where near that level of trust.
I'll trust them when I can inspect their source code and chip schematics.
It does not matter if you trust them as long as non technical people do. Because HN crowd is less than 1% or people. People trust apple way more than meta.
> People trust apple way more than meta.
I think it's more a case of the HN crowd trusts Apple way more than Meta.
Meta has ~3.5 billion users while Apple has ~2.5 billion users and Meta is one of their top app developers, which suggests people trust both of these companies way more than they should.
"Trust" and "use the services of" are very different things
Agreed, dozens of countries rely on Facebook for even government. Plenty of EU countries for example assume WhatsApp to a point where it's practically non-negotiable if you want to participate in the economy at all.
> strip out pictures of people and PII by default
You trust Meta to do this unfailingly, without making an exception for themselves which you will consent to somwhere in a 30 page user agreement or a dark pattern in the UI?
That goes against the very soul of their being as demonstrated by everything they've done to date.
If meta actually wanted to sell consumer electronics to people. They have no choice but to actually compete with apple and apple will beat them in the poll "would you buy this exactly same ___ device from Apple or Meta?" at least today in 2026.
If they can strip out pictures of people and PII by default from video feed and enforce explicit consent(digitally).
Seriously, trust Meta to do anything privacy preserving? Besides that, they also record audio.
With the rise of cellphone video posted online I don't think it has the same visceral reaction it once did around the Google Glass era.
I think there are many reasons some but not all imo:
- The price difference. Calling a person who dropped $1,500 on a "tech glasses" in 2013 a glasshole made sense. It felt like someone with more money than sense. Meta glasses are $299 today that's just small gadget money so there is no "too much money, little sense" aspect
- Tech went 100% mainstream. It wasn't exactly an exclusively nerdy or geeky thing in 2013 anymore like the 90s or early 2000s, but there was still certain "Too much tech means you are a socially incompetent neckbeard". Today the biggest socialites online often do a tech haul style videos about the latest tech gadgets they got.
- Cameras exploded everywhere. Everyone has watched footage from Ring, GoPro, traffic lights, security cams, court cams, dashcams, police body cams, etc. Plenty of regular people got home cameras too and find it very useful to keep an eye on pets, backyards, etc. Plenty of very regular people have stories about how their cameras saved their ass in one occasion or another. There has been plenty of high-profile news stories about how a Tesla or a Ring camera helped solve a crime or catch a horrific murder or criminal.
- The proliferation of prank YouTubers in the 2010s. Even though most of them were paid actors, going out and acting as a douch and recording it became a mainstream. Kids love it, and despite the "backlash" they were getting millions regardless
- It doesn't matter how you feel about meta glasses or google glasses, you will have reports online of people who tell you how those products changed their life for the better because it helped them overcome some adversity, or protected them in a victim situation or literally saved their life in some situation
Don't forget prices have doubled since 2013, so it was $3000 equivalent in today's money.
Because the frog as been continuously boiling for a while now, so even if it generates a negative reaction it will be smaller than before.
For some reason in the last ten years, people have gone from being critical of corporations to favoring them. I think these companies have become so huge, and they have gotten away with so much, that people have resigned themselves to being at their mercy.
This doesn't seem to be the case- https://news.gallup.com/poll/5248/big-business.aspx
People are nearly universally critical of Meta, the only place I see people defending or talk positively about it is here.
Really? I agree that many are resigned, but I see much more skepticism of everything Big Tech companies do today than there was during the Obama administration.
Although, this chart suggests that Google’s popularity hasn’t changed much, which is a bit surprising:
https://yougov.com/en-us/trackers/fame-and-popularity-google...
i think there are few people that realize all the problems solved by tech have been created by tech.
I think there has been a growing failure in identifying fake opinions and accounts from real ones. Who's checking that the people you are engaging with are real, aren't AI or LLMs hired by some 3rd party agency to manufacture opinion about some company or cause?
At the time there were two camps: tech-optimists who saw the value in a device that brought the power of the internet on top of your view of the world, and the other camp who worried about privacy or the "creep factor" and believed that outweighed any potential benefit.
When Google Glass came out that latter group had more sway culturally and more political power to ban such things. They don't have that as much anymore but that could swing back in their favor again
"Tech optimists" is an extremely kind term here. The other group was 'worried about the creep factor' because their opposition were the creeps. This is still the case today.
It is a generational thing. Gen Z grew up with an internet where it was normalized to share your complete life online, create posts under your real identity, and so on. Give it 1 - 2 generations, and perv glasses will be seen as not intrusive.
Gen Z (and Alpha for that matter) very carefully curate their online lives. There is a distinct and appreciable difference between how they act when there are visible cameras and when there are not.
The kids are savvy.
In other words, I disagree with you. I think they'll be more likely to use them, but only under very particular circumstances.
>Gen Z grew up with an internet where it was normalized to share your complete life online
I don't see that. Social media seems to be a Millenial phenomenon. Gen Z hates the internet despite using it. Gen Z uses nicknames rather than real names. Gen Z prefers private chatrooms to the exhibitionism of Facebook
Gen Z is very opposed to perv glasses tbh and we are not generally speaking the same kind of "tech optimists" that prior generations often were. I think you've got your generational stereotypes a little off.
A decade ago, I would have said that's an individual person problem. Though these companies don't understand the word "No" and have already pushed the boundaries to the point that they're all in collusion with each other, resulting in broken privacy.
At least US-side, nothing will change until people start holding their representatives accountable and start voting for people that will actually do something about it.
This wont happen anytime soon, we have a much bigger problem we're dealing with for the next two years.
> nothing will change until people start holding their representatives accountable
Which itself won't change. The term for holding representatives accountable is "lobbying", which the public believes is an abhorrent act!
> and start voting for people that will actually do something about it.
The thing is, who wins an election matters little. There are always exceptions, and we've definitely seen exceptions, but most representatives are there in good faith. However, they are not mind readers. They can't do anything aligned to the people until the people start lobbying to make it known what they want — but the people won't do that because it is seen as abhorrent behavior.
> This wont happen anytime soon
Especially when appears likely that those companies are responsible for making the people believe that it is unacceptable to lobby. They have the marketing budgets and know-how to keep pushing that narrative until the end of time.
I could be wrong. Like when you're dumb enough to eliminate large swaths of the workforce, especially technologically skilled workers, you're risking these people using these same technologies to vote you out.
People know how to game the algorithms presented to them, so it's not as simple as having ad-bucks anymore.
Do they? I don't.
> The term for holding representatives accountable is "lobbying", which the public believes is an abhorrent act!
That’s a misrepresentation. You see plenty of exhortations to “call your representative”, which technically could be called lobbying, but that’s not what people find problematic. The issue is professional lobbying, which involves people paid to lobby, and often involves money or other incentives for the representative being lobbied. This kind of lobbying is not actually focused on holding representatives accountable, but rather on changing their positions.
As such, the above quote really doesn’t have much bearing on how much the public holds, or wants to hold, representatives accountable.
> That’s a misrepresentation.
No matter how much you try to apologize it away the reality remains that the public abhors talking to their representatives. According to the 2016 US census on behaviour, only 10% of the public do. Which, conveniently, is exactly the same proportion of the population whose livelihood comes from ownership of a business. You're right to point out that business lobbying doesn't have the same stigma (or more likely when survival is on the line you stop caring about what other people think), but I think the earlier commenter already recognized that.
"No" has been replaced with "Maybe Later".
Salami tactics.
See also: "We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back." - Jean Claude Juncker
Big Tech despises the idea of consent.
And what they despise even more, and don't give you the choice of if they can avoid it, is dissent.
I've been collecting flagged posts for months now. It's very interesting to see the upvote counts vs it's visibility through the main pages.
That’s not just Big Tech. All corporations fight the rules that bind them.
The issues around privacy are inherent in an internet that is paid for by targeted advertising. If there is privacy there is no way to pay the small amounts for email for example.
If we want privacy, we need an alternative business model.
The Internet was in many ways a better place before data capitalism came along so the likes of Google and Facebook could monetise.
We had email and it worked just fine. You got an account via your ISP or paid a small amount for a separate service and perhaps a custom domain that you controlled yourself. Centralising this with the likes of Google is not progress.
We had more content than anyone could ever consume in a lifetime on the Web even back then. It was mostly created by people interested in sharing for personal satisfaction and perhaps the enjoyment of a good discussion that followed or by organisations that benefitted from sharing that information freely. It wasn't done with a direct profit motive based on metrics like page views. We didn't have endless AI spam designed to host endless auctioned ad spots diluting the good stuff.
So here's my proposed privacy-friendly alternative business model: You don't get to harvest personal data for reasons unrelated to whatever products or services you're providing to willing consumers and if you do then we throw you in jail. I'm pretty sure the Internet would find a way to continue providing the functionality that is actually useful. I'm pretty sure the signal/noise ratio online would be much better too.
Possession of the data has to be illegal, enforced through statutory civil damages.
Civil damages can become merely a "cost of doing business".
Jail time for the responsible executives makes it personal for the decision makers. Obviously there still needs to be due process. It would be sensible to have stages where there are clear warnings given by the relevant regulators with indications of the specific remediation actions required and then a reasonable amount of time to actually implement that remediation before anyone is getting carted off in handcuffs for non-compliance.
I am not generally in favour of piercing the corporate veil but in cases of flagrant and deliberate disregard for the law I think there is a point where it becomes justified and perhaps even necessary.
I see the point. My misgiving is that jail time means the government can just refrain from enforcing it because the leaders have found favor with one another.
A data breach of 10 million records, times $10k per offense, might not deter Google, but it would raise the eyebrows of smaller violators. An industry of class action lawyers might emerge to specialize in those claims.
I feel like we need to have privacy laws enshrined in the constitution before bigtech stops their bullshitting.
the constitution is about what the government is allowed to do, and we do have those
I don't see the problem. What prevents us from making the constitution force the government to never accept anti-privacy laws, etc.?
Is some sort of "personal" jammer hardware plausible?
No. The only solve is to start voting and voting for people that actually fix these problems instead of bowing to corporate interests over people interests.
it would be interesting to see if the "camera light has been tampered with" 'privacy mechanism' could be remotely triggered by some carefully timed application of electromagnetic energy pulses ;)
Well, cell signal jammers are illegal. I could see the possibility of something like a Meta-produced device that could be set to disable recording by Meta glasses in the vicinity. That seems different in scope. But lol on that.
More & more tech is starting to look like a pretty sketchy industry
> ...while they also expect the owners of these devices to use them responsibly and to notify those around them of their capabilities to act within whatever laws their states may have.
Hell, no. They expect you to act as uninformed and oblivious about it as possible so they can scrape the maximum amount of data while the liability is all yours.
Exactly this. Anyone who wears these smart glasses are just selling themselves for a negative return. Like meta should be giving these glasses away given how much data they harvest. Instead they convince rubes and pervs to actually pay for it.
Seems like this is flatly illegal in two party consent states, but I see no mention of this in the article or comments. Am I missing something?
Someone should invest some serious money for a big ad campaign that explains the state of privacy of 2026 to people. From online tracking and fingerprinting to cars and street cameras etc.
Governments could do it. Or tv stations.. (“the more you know..”)
Tell it like it is and perhaps fewer will elect to consume crazy conspiracy theories. And instead make better life choices.
The response I tend to see is "why should I care? I'm boring. I'm not doing anything wrong."
There is no profit in privacy, but there is in exploiting people’s secrets.
What? Govts wants everyone (except politicians) to have no privacy.
These devices are illegal and make you face jail time ok most European countries.
I’m not disputing the legality point but I don’t believe you can point to even one person who was jailed for using such a device.
So perhaps “face jail time” is not accurate.
Has anyone tried? I had the opportunity but did not pursue it, but someone must be trying to fight it.
Tried what? Putting someone in jail?
Give it time. I am sure the Israelis, the Ukrainians, and the Russians will be world leaders in this type of jamming technology I have a feeling infrared light jamming cameras and sound frequencies beyond human hearing are going to be key components of this new technology. I’m ready, and so is my checkbook.
Shut up and take my money. Something undetectable, which will make the camera produce smoke and fail permanently.
As a passive sensor, cameras are essentially undetectable at-range and requires a dangerous and likely illegal amount of directed energy to disable or damage.
The proliferation of battlefield EOTS has made this sort of system a real priority, but we have no anti-radiation defenses against passive sensors. It's likely that a civilian system in that vein will never exist, let alone a military option.
Given the overall trend, jamming may become illegal. Give it time.
Jamming is illegal already.
Sadly that's not the case, or at least not in Germany. A judge actually refused to block the sale of the glasses because it was considered that the LED were sufficient warning. Sure, you can still use them covertly and releasing material often requires a waiver, but that's true of smartphones too.
There's a case right now (brought forward by the HateAid organization) arguing that these types of glasses should be forbidden, but I'm not optimistic that they'll succeed.
plain and simple, we are talking about obscured/hidden cameras, period.
it doesnt matter if its behind a pinhole, mounted on a badge, or crammed in a pair of glasses, its all the same.
Expected an anti nuisance streamer app by now. Just playing ad reels and copyrighted music above and below human hearing levels. Since algo bots will usually scan that high/low and bury videos for whatever is considered an infraction.
People in Europe install surveillance cameras all over and threaten with the police when you tell them you don't consent being recorded. When you go to the police reporting the cameras, the police tells you to get a lawyer and open a civil case.
So on the contrary I'd say... you want cameras? We'll go all in.
you cant go to the lawyer either; their brother sells the cameras XD
The brother is also retired policeman. After your visit at the police station your house is added to their "favourite playlist".
Depends which Europe, I know its popular US view to treat us as 1 monolithic country but we are anything but that. In Switzerland for example its strictly forbidden to record people privately without their consent, and good luck dealing with Swiss police on spot, they are not that kind to such assholism.
I'm a little disappointed to see this article make no distinction between Apple implementing hard technical barriers between them and your data, plus very detailed technical white papers describing many of the barriers they implement, and Facebook offering some virtual settings that let you feel slightly differently while they use your data either way. Are those really the same thing?
I feel like Apple has the best track record, in general, of detailing exactly what security measures they actually use to protect your data. Other companies are just like, trust me bro. Literally like every other company is like that.
In my view, this is precisely the kind of water-carrying that has led to the incremental erosion of our privacy in the first place. It happened little by little, enabled by opinions like this, who say "well at least foo is doing it in a more privacy-preserving way than bar", and each additional little erosion, each pebble on the beach newly washed away, is built on top of this new expectation, rather than the old status quo.
Go back ten years, and compare to today, and tell me whether we as a society would be happy with that difference occurring overnight. We wouldn't. But we let it happen over 500 odd weeks, with a new intrusion each week built on top of the last.
I reject the premise. They are functionally the same over a longer time span, but only Apple wins plaudits for it. They are as guilty as the rest of them.
The goal is so obviously to push the last sane people to isolate themselves from the other humans to not have to cope with all the bullshit.
US Constituion understands privacy as self-sovereignty. As in I am the boss of me.
My prior folk understanding was that privacy is me deciding what is publicly known about me.
Since I am my personal data and that data is me, I own every single bit of my data.
The fix to surveillance capitalists abusing all our data (and by extension ourselves) is to recognize and enforce our property rights.
Any private entity storing, using, or both, any of my data owes me. Pay up.
> US Constituion understands privacy as self-sovereignty. As in I am the boss of me.
It doesn't. The Bill of Rights does, and it was pushed by the anti-federalists. It is also constantly eroded, and the entire package put together in the context of slavery, a group of people born with no rights. It certainly doesn't have an opinion about whether you have an intellectual property right over facts about yourself.
The Constitution isn't a metaphysical document that can be confused by this sort of psychedelic reasoning about some sort of natural property rights. It is a document that is enforced by Congress and the Judiciary. If they both agree that you shouldn't have any privacy, you won't have any privacy. Neither have been restraining the Executive since 9/11; and they've only barely restraining the states and local municipalities, and not always in a good way.
Your privacy rights come from the psychedelic reasoning of the Judiciary, and can be taken away if they switch drug preferences. It has been decided that privacy rights are written in shadows* cast by the constitution. Really. And only since 1965 - you might be older than your constitutional privacy rights.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law)
Thanks, that's important history.
I've read that article before. I've worked on both voter and patient privacy, so have thought about privacy well enough for a layperson. IANAL, obviously.
We don't have the explicit right to vote either. Is that a problem? I don't know. Though I favor the notion that since we had to vote the Constitution into law, the right to vote is an unstated precursor (or whatever lawyerly language applies).
So it is with privacy. Privacy is a modern term. But the founders were certainly against unlawful search and seizure, compelled testimony, etc. Quacks like a duck...
I'll concede that, with a few exceptions, SCOTUS has historically been actively hostile towards individual rights.
EFF is onto something HN is not generally on the right side of this. The hacker community, to my observation, is deeply divided. Cynically, I think half of hackers have become dissociative and mildly sociopathic in terms of their views of technology.
Tech should benefit people and be open, and trillionaire are not a healthy long term indicator in a stable society.
I didn’t read the post. I didn’t have to. They wanna shift it to you have no privacy anywhere at any time correct?
The tech companies leading the charge are mainly the ad companies in short, the companies that have a cost of acquisition because most people do not and will not buy anything from them and in most cases never will ie.. Facebook, Google and soon the AI model makers.
If you are about to comment on it, why not read the article? Why leave it to chance whether your contribution will be signal or noise?
In the article, EEF discusses the currently emerging issue of not being able to consent to other people's always-on wearable technology in the context of the broader problem of our diminishing ability to speak openly. It ends with a clear message on how to oppose such developments in a constructive, meaningful way.
Dear Internet, please summarize this article for me. Make no mistakes.
Tech companies respond to incentives. If the technology exists to create and sell devices that are useful to people and legal, then they'll do it, and people will buy and use them. And that is fantastic - I'm great with tech companies making tools that makes my life easier. I absolutely plan on using the heck out of the next wave of AR glasses for digitizing historical documents so I can have both hands free instad of holding a phone in one. Better audio recording devices? Yes, please.
Simultaneously - I own my words, either written or spoken. This isn't really all that different from copyright, and I'm rather surprised we don't more regularly bring that reasoning to bear on this issue. If I give them to you in a private conversation, then those words are for you to hear. If you record them without my consent, then you're violating my (copy)right. If a company takes those words without my consent, then that company is violating my copyright.
I don't know exactly what should happen to people and companies violating my copyright, but I do remember when it was the other way around a few years back and the RIAA was getting people fined thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per incident. That seems about right.
> Simultaneously - I own my words, either written or spoken. This isn't really all that different from copyright, and I'm rather surprised we don't more regularly bring that reasoning to bear on this issue. If I give them to you in a private conversation, then those words are for you to hear. If you record them without my consent, then you're violating my (copy)right. If a company takes those words without my consent, then that company is violating my copyright.
The copyright situation is interesting, at least under US law, because is most cases where someone on the street records you speaking you will not copyright. That's because of a loophole in the way the copyright statute works.
People commonly believe that when the US changed from copyright coming into existence when you register your work they switched to it coming into existence as soon as your create the work, but that is not correct. 17 USC 102(a) tells us that copyright subsists in works that are
>> [...] fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
But what does it mean to be "fixed" in a tangible medium of expression? For that we must turn to 17 USC 101:
>> A work is “fixed” in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration.
Their recording of you is not "by or under the authority of the author" so is not a fixation, so your work is not copyrighted yet.
Congress recognized this loophole and partly closed it in 1994, with 17 USC 1101, which is titled "Unauthorized fixation and trafficking in sound recordings and music videos". This closes it in the case where you are, say, a street musician and someone records your song which is not yet copyrighted because you have not yet recorded it or written down the sheet music or tab. It gives such a musician essentially the same rights and remedies they would have if they had copyright.
But that is explicitly for music. Unless you start singing everything you say in public it won't help you. Even if you do that, those devices that just immediately transcribe what they hear probably would not be covered, because no matter how creative a melody you come up with to sing "I'll have a medium Big Mac meal with a coke please" to, they will just be recording your lyrics. US requires a certain level of creativity in a work for it to be copyrightable and "I'll have a medium Big Mac meal with a coke please" is probably not going to make the cut.
You best defense, if you want to have a chance of federal copyright applying, is to wear something of your own that records you. Then your words are fixed under the authority of the author (you) as soon as you speak them, and so if they do meet the bar for being copyrightable they will be copyrighted.
There is also state common-law copyright law to consider. Federal copyright law preempts state copyright law, and with it so easy to get federal copyright you don't really tend to hear much about state copyright law.
However, that loophole that makes federal copyright law not attach also makes it so state copyright law is not preempted for works that fall into the federal loophole. State common law copyright tends to be more generous or expansive than federal copyright, so this is probably your best copyright bet.
This suggests that you may want to actually avoid recording yourself, to avoid any chance of getting federal copyright and thus having state common law copyright law preempted.
I did a little searching, and apparently whether you should record yourself or not has been debated and analyzed in other contexts like stand-up comedy performances and public lectures.
The AI tech companies already violated perhaps millions of copyrights.
They should have quite a hefty fine to pay.
The one moving the goal post is the eff. There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces.
It is legal and moral for me to take a video of someone in public. If I can do it with a phone I can do it with glasses.
A shop having a camera pointed outside is not breaking the law, even if it's hidden from view.
There has never been a requirement for devices to indicate anything to those they are recording. It at most a curtsy.
> There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces.
The devices the article is talking about don't stop recording when you exit a "public space". They record everywhere.
> There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces.
As always, scale matters, as does the purpose of the surveillance and the affiliation of the surveilling party. This comment of mine from last month (and the document linked in the footnote) will be good reading for you. [0] Also keep in mind that private entities can be legally considered to be agents of the State... depending on how they and the State are conducting themselves.
[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50027322>
> *Apple is an EFF donor. EFF donors do not influence our agenda or our positions.
Oh sure, otherwise why would you emphasize over and over again that Apple makes it harder for law enforcement to extract private data of an individual?