Selling You the Panopticon Wholesale

Ring, the doorbell camera firm owned by Amazon, ran a commercial during the Super Bowl about finding a dog. It is one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen — not because that showed how users can create a surveillance system out of the camera system but because it demonstrated how tech intends to sell us our own doom.

The product allows users of the system to find pets. You have access to, at least, the cameras in your area, finds the pet in the footage of other people and allows those people to notify you that the pet is found. Allegedly, this is limited to pets, but Ring already has an agreement with Flock (killed in the wake of the backlash to the commercial), a license plate reading form known for giving data, sans warrant, to law enforcement. And ring already has a feature that allows owners to register, for lack of a better term, people they know so that the cameras can automatically identify them. You, of course, have no say if your image is used this way. And while Ring likes to say that the ownership belongs to the users, what they mean is that the ownership belongs to the person who captured the footage. It is easy to imagine a future where Ring owners turn over camera footage about “lost” children our spouses who are running from an abuser directly to that abuser. And Ring will have convinced them that this is a benefit.

The commercial promised the ability to be a hero, showing happy children reunited by with their dogs by the benevolent panopticon Ring provides. They clearly intend to use these features as a selling point. And while the push failed this time, they clearly intend to continue. The next ad, I am sure, will focus on something like solving a crime, a mix of fear and heroism. Because tech very much does not concern itself with privacy. It is not just Ring — the entire industry is based on stealing your privacy. Meta has just admitted as much.

Meta, apparently, intends to add facial recognition to its “smart” glasses. Based on a leaked memo, it feels this is a good time to do such a move because the non-profits that would normally raise the alarm are too underfunded and focused on the Administration’s abuses to be much of a problem. The memo, of course, is an admission that such a move would be problematic, and that they hope to make the feature a reality before opposition can be marshaled. And marshaled it should be. There are very few positive used for this technology and they are severely outweighed by the drawbacks.

Perhaps the facial recognition can save you a moment of awkwardness when you cannot find a name. Perhaps it will allow to identify a bad actor of state power, though there are less intrusive ways to do so. Perhaps, if you think this is a good use, you might be able to shame someone who behaves badly in public. But, honestly, is that really good? Most people are not their worst moments, and everyone human has moments where they act poorly under stress or exhaustion. And that is about the limit of what could be described as good uses — one inconsequential, one likely redundant, and one of dubious value. On the other hand, the damage these can do is enormous.

First, it must be understood that these glasses are not just a camera. They are much closer to hidden cameras. Indicators that they are recording can be turned off, and the indicator is unobtrusive, likely on purpose. A hidden camera is not like a phone camera. When you use a phone camera, it is clear that you are being recorded. These devices provide no such clarity. They can be used, then, to capture images that are much less likely to have consent or even awareness of the people in the photos. Adding facial recognition makes it easier for someone to turn their images into deepfakes tied to, for example, fake Only Fans accounts (and yes, such things are already happening with other tools). It makes it easier to identify service workers and harass them. It makes it easier for ICE agents to identify people and assault them for being known observers. It makes it easier for people to kidnap children — earning their trust by using facial recognition to find their names.

There are ways, of course, to mitigate these harms, but the simple fact is that no one in tech is really interested in privacy. And since they are not interested in privacy, they continue to try and sell people on the virtues of its disappearance. Ring should be banned from recognition technology and Meta should be banned from at least the facial recognition technology. They provide little to no benefits, and they are direct attacks on the privacy of everyone around their users. Human beings are not meant to live in glass houses, to have every moment subject to the glare of other people. You need both the brownian motion of bouncing off other humans beings and the space to process those interactions to be fully human. A privacy-free existence is acid on the bonds that make human society possible.

And Amazon and Meta want to sell you that acid by the barrel.