Congrats on Joining the Ubiquitous Surveillance Panopticon

Oh, you have a problem with that? I guess you don't want to find lost dogs, you monster.

As amusing as the right-wing freakout over Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the Super Bowl was, I am restraining myself from offering my own Hot Take on that subject. Instead, I want to talk about something else that happened during the telecast: this ad from Ring, which as you may know is owned by Amazon.

“Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone, for free, right now.” For free? You mean I get to turn my front door into a node in the ubiquitous spying panopticon, and I don’t even have to pay for it? Wow!

For the record, as a general matter I am in favor of lost dogs finding their way home. But this is an unusually ham-handed attempt to convince you that your voluntary adoption of a dystopian technology actually makes you more virtuous. It’s also unusual in that Ring is casting a light on the unsavory aspect of their product; only the most dimwitted viewer could watch that ad and not think “Hang on, if all these cameras are being linked together in one seamless surveillance network, couldn’t that be used in some problematic ways? I thought I was just keeping an eye out for someone stealing my Amazon packages.”

The way it usually works is that the tech company does everything possible to hide these kinds of capabilities from consumers; all you hear about are the useful and cool things the product can do for you, while the way your data is being vacuumed up, stored, sorted, and sold are relegated to page 43 of the terms and conditions. But here they are saying “Isn’t it neat that every inch of your neighborhood is under constant video surveillance, and you can’t go for a walk around the block without it being recorded and logged?”

Trouble is, even if most people would say that makes them uncomfortable, they keep buying these cameras, tens of millions of them. But let’s say you’re worried that ICE is going to use the data being uploaded from your camera to kidnap some of your neighbors. Don’t worry, Ring says, we don’t have a relationship like that with ICE.

Except Ring is partnering with Flock, a company that maintains a network of license plate cameras that allows them to track you pretty much any time you get in your car; Flock’s data is sold to local law enforcement, and ICE can get the Flock data from those local police departments. It’s all one big beautiful web of surveillance.

While we’re on the subject: Remember how for a while there everyone was convinced that their phones were constantly listening to them and serving them up ads based on things they said, and the response from Google and Apple was basically “Don’t be ridiculous, we’d never do that”? Well it may have escaped your notice, but yeah, they were doing that. Two weeks ago, Google agreed to settle a lawsuit for $68 million alleging that Google Assistant was listening to people when it wasn’t supposed to, and a year ago Apple settled another lawsuit on the same grounds.

For all their reassuring words about how committed they are to preserving your privacy, the billionaires who run the dominant tech companies see ubiquitous surveillance as self-evidently desirable, because that’s how they make their money. And they’ve always known it, even when those capabilities were just being developed. This 2012 Bloomberg article about Facebook described the company’s goals:

“We are trying to map out the graph of everything in the world and how it relates to each other,” says Mike Vernal, one of the company’s top engineers. The goal, he says, is to record every book, film, and song a person has ever consumed, then build a spectacular model of other things that person could enjoy. Take that vision to its logical end: You show up in a strange city and Facebook tells you what bar to go to. When you get there the bartender has your favorite drink waiting, and you’re able to look around the room and see if anyone there went to your college or likes the San Francisco Giants. You may find this kind of universal social mapping exciting, or creepy. Zuckerberg describes it as inevitable.

Having your favorite drink waiting for you is the bait; what they’re really after is the information it represents, so they can sell that information to other businesses. The more they monitor you, the more you create trails of data they can extract for their own benefit. But only some of those businesses are interested in selling you other stuff; some of them are after something even more sinister. Just ask Oracle chief Larry Ellison, the friend of Trump who now controls the American version of TikTok. “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” he recently told his company’s investors. “It’s unimpeachable.”

I wish I could tell you that there is an easy answer to this problem, but part of the tech companies’ method is to make surveillance so ubiquitous in our lives that unless you made it into your full-time job, you could never track down all the ways you’re being tracked, let alone find the buttons that will let you opt out (and most of the time, no such button exists). Critically — and this will be an important component of the coming AI onslaught — the products and services into which the surveillance is integrated will actually do useful or entertaining things, which is why we’ll keep buying them.

So what should you do? On a personal level, you can opt out of giving up your data wherever possible, and choose not to buy tech that has surveillance of you and others as its primary purpose (like doorbell cameras that automatically upload everything they see to the company). Politically, you can support candidates and policies that will protect your privacy and your humanity — because there are going to be many important political fights in the near future over the future of technology and what it does to us. It’s not a solution, but it’s a start. This problem is only going to get more acute, so we’re all going to have to pay more attention to it.

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