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?”
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.
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)
I don't have the authority to make the meaningful decisions, just to do my job efficiently.
Casual meetings can have misconstrued words.
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’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.
You can ask someone to turn it off.
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.
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.
Might be a German/European thing though...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
ICE is doing things that have nothing to do with them. DHS has subpoenaed tech companies to unmask people who criticize ICE online, and a federal judge ruled ICE likely violated the First Amendment by sending agents to warn a man over an email.
Hundreds of US citizens have been detained by immigration agents, and most were never charged with anything. Federal judges, including Trump appointees, have found illegal detentions THOUSANDS of times.
Enforcing the law is the OPPOSITE of violating the Constitution.
This is dishonest. Claiming that it is bad for " ICE and the DOJ have used social media and every government database they can" to detect illegal immigrants, especially in the context of talking about Nazi Germany, with the implication that ICE is morally equivalent to the Nazis using bureaucratic records to find and persecute their enemies, is in fact an argument against enforcing border laws.
It's completely reasonable for the government to have records of which people are citizens and of what the specific legal status is of non-citizens present in the country. It's completely reasonable for the police agencies in charge of enforcing border laws to use those records to find people in violation of those laws and arrest and deport them. It's completely reasonable for the same police agencies to look at social media posts of people talking, sometimes even bragging, about their undocumented status and use that as a basis to arrest and deport them for violating immigration law.
The only reason not to think this is if you think it's inherently wrong to enforce immigration laws at all, which many people do, and often lie about because it sounds extreme to say it that bluntly.
Bullshit.
There are a HUGE number of reasons to think that there should be meaningful controls over what data the government aggregates and accesses, and how that's handled.
Fuck off with your authoritarian horseshit, and your dreams of an omnipotent government.
This is reasonable in principle. I think that those meaningful data controls should make citizenship and legal immigration status completely public and completely transparent to all parts of the government, as well as to the general public, at all times. So not only should ICE and every single other government agency be able to instantly tell if someone they are interacting with is a citizen, a legal immigrant, or an illegal immigrant - I personally as an ordinary citizen should be able to do the same thing; in the same way that right now I can look up who gave donations to political candidates or parties by name, or look at someone's ID and figure out if it's legal or illegal for me to sell them alcohol.
Targeting specific minorities and political opponents, and detaining US citizens without access to legal representation or their families. I'm not sure how you missed these events which have been widely reported, and are unprecedented and illegal (but with a cowardly lack of any pushback / checks+balances).
The parent comment is obviously speaking about what happened in Hitler's Germany
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And even then it’s a crap shoot
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]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.
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 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'll trust them when I can inspect their source code and chip schematics.
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.
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.
Seriously, trust Meta to do anything privacy preserving? Besides that, they also record audio.
- 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
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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.
People know how to game the algorithms presented to them, so it's not as simple as having ad-bucks anymore.
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
If we want privacy, we need an alternative business model.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So perhaps “face jail time” is not accurate.
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.
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.
it doesnt matter if its behind a pinhole, mounted on a badge, or crammed in a pair of glasses, its all the same.
So on the contrary I'd say... you want cameras? We'll go all in.
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.
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.
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.
Tech should benefit people and be open, and trillionaire are not a healthy long term indicator in a stable society.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They should have quite a hefty fine to pay.
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.
The devices the article is talking about don't stop recording when you exit a "public space". They record everywhere.
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.
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?