Junk Drawer
For all those little papers scattered across your desk
Junk DrawerFor all those little papers scattered across your desk
The Wall Street Journal article I Recorded Everything I Said for Three Months. AI Has Replaced My Memory. is another example of tech reporters being unwilling to ask the hard questions and push back.
When a company records your voice, stores it on their server, and says they don’t sell it: Do you believe them? Or do you ask to see policies and controls?
Then there’s the notion that troves of data like this are almost always eventually leaked: are you still sure that the privacy trade-off will be worth it in the future?
What does it even mean for these assistive devices to get “more helpful and more human-like”? And even if they were to become more helpful, that doesn’t mean that all bets are off on privacy. Privacy is still important.
Worse, writing that it’s only a matter of time before these things are baked into other devices precludes the world where we decide that privacy is important and instead lauds the companies that invade our privacy. To me, that’s sloppy. It’s unserious. It’s a naked ad masquerading as journalism. There are tech communities actively working to make privacy the default, and there are policy communities actively working to make privacy a matter of law.
As American police forces have no doubt found thanks to the tireless work of activists1, being recorded all the time is not a punchline to close an ad.
The act of recording law enforcement, in addition to being a measure of safety, is an important exercise in turning the watcher into the watched. Pervasive police and state surveillance are met by pervasive recording of the state. If that makes the watched police uncomfortable, then perhaps they will understand how the surveilled and scrutinized communities they claim to protect feel. ↩