If you thought pervert glasses weren’t bad enough, Apple is taking it up a notch by adding cameras to its AirPods.
Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate.
In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title. “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later,” says the voiceover text.
↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors
AirPods are tiny. I’ve seen people use them at the gym. I’ve seen them on playgrounds. I’ve seen them around swimming pools. People use them at the beach. They’re used at schools. In locker rooms. Tiny cameras in tiny AirPods that can photograph anything in front of the user are a pervert’s wet dream. Abusers are going to love this. Why wear bulky glasses anyone can see and try to demand you take off, when you can wear tiny AirPods that have already been fully normalised in society? Was there not a single woman or parent on the team that made this?
All over the United States, people are destroying Flock surveillance cameras. More and more communities are rising up and demanding these things removed from their streets and neighbourhoods. The awareness of just how pervasive mass government surveillance has become is growing, and Silicon Valley’s complicity is not exactly a secret. And in this climate of rapidly growing concern and anger, Apple is going to add tiny cameras to its tiny AirPods. Was there not a single person of colour or protester on the team that made this?
How detached from reality do you have to be to greenlight something like this? Does anyone – regardless of skin colour, gender, or political leaning – want even more cameras around them?
I would vote for this option with both hands. In my opinion, there’s no such thing as enough surveillance. More cameras means more security and more options to find and punish any villain who tries to break the law. We are living in the world where every week at least 4 terror attacks are performed, including stabbing people with knifes in western countries like Germany and France. Finding and punishing these attackers should be prioritized over any other thing.
But we already know that while you are protecting persons’ privacy, I would sacrifice it for security. PTSD after four terror attacks I survived.
Survived four terror attacks? I’m not sure if you are being literal or hyperbolic, but, since you are not concerned about your privacy, please keep us posted about your whereabouts. I will happily avoid sharing the same public spaces. =)
Of course, surviving even one terror attack is definitely a traumatic experience. Therapy can help. Seeing the world as a inherently dangerous place populated by hostile humans makes for a life that is less worth living. I’ve been robbed 5 times, 3 of them at gunpoint (my family is originally from Rio), and living in fear and stress was not fun, Therapy helped.
Jokes aside, and I am not even sure the quote is actual, but:
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” is a quote and motto attributed to Benjamin Franklin.
Keep in mind that some of the safest countries in the world are also some of the keenest on privacy protections. And also that, once you let go of your privacy, you won’t have a voice to protest for your freedom. You can always mingle among KGB and STASI folks at a well-known cafe in Dresden.
There’s always a cost to having freedom and liberty. Just as you are free to make good choices, others will make bad choices. But a system that successfully suppresses people’s autonomy to make bad choices will also stop you and many others of making good choices, too.
I think you will find the GP commentor literally has the picture of a troll as their profile picture.
That’s not a troll, that’s supposed to be a dragon. It’s my icon since 2001, from the Technion students’ forum.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… how did Bush said that again? =)
Don’t get fooled again.
I’m literal. I survived 4 bombing by Hamas: Beit Lid double suicide bombing in January 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beit_Lid_suicide_bombing), Haifa bus line 16 suicide attack in December 2001, Haifa “Matza” restaurant bombing in March 2002 and finally Haifa bus line 37 suicide attack in March 2003. At the time of the last one I was already certified for paramedical help, I was sitting in the very end of the very crowded bus and suffered only minor injures, so I tried to help other wounded people, I stopped artery bleeding from severed leg of one of the wounded, and then one girl died literally in my hands because of penetrating wound into her chest and lung collapse.
If you allow terror to rule your actions, then terrorists achieve their goals.
However, I think basic security (which includes total surveillance) can prevent additional terror attacks and unnecessary deaths, or at least will help finding the terrorists and/or their sidekicks (like the persons that drove them to the location of the attack) and provide them with justice.
The quote is real, but even though it is commonly framed as referring to individual liberty, it is actually about taxes, and the liberty he is referring to is the government’s own liberty.
Basically, the Pennsylvania state government wanted to tax the wealthiest landowners to help fund the state militia. The landowners countered with an offer of a rather large one time lump sum for the militia in exchange for NEVER again raising taxes.
The lump sum payment was the “temporary security”, while the “essential liberty” being exchanged is the state’s legislative authority to collect taxes.
It remains valid for the extended context.
It’s actually a nice way of showing how a surveillance state makes all of this dysfunctional: in a functional democracy where leadership is threatened by the will of the people, the liberty of the state is, in fact, the liberty of the people. Once the people trade out their freedom for their security, what’s to stop the state leaders from abusing the state’s liberty by framing people who threaten established leadership ?
Indeed, in such a scenario (which, really, is less fictional every day that passes), you get neither liberty nor security, since you can’t express an opinion that threatens leadership without fearing dreadful consequences.
There’s a reason “total surveillance” is never associated with global well-being in literature.
While I hate the 24/7 surveillance state as much as anyone else, that quote is the literal base of the social contract.
Quite a few of these Flock cameras are being installed outside marijuana dispensaries and abortion clinics in a clear attempt to retroactively punish people for legal things they want to make illegal.
dark2,
Supreme Court (finally) ruled that the “geofence warrants” were unconstitutional, and the government could no longer compel Google and others to retrieve user data on a blanket geographical region.
Cell phone providers can no longer tap voice or text, as both have migrated to end to end encryption.
So, they are doing the next best thing, installing their own surveillance network
Even when cities actively vote against it.
Democracy is such a great system isn’t it?
(Btw, Flock seems to be especially eggregious. There are others like Axon, but they were more “defensive” not “offensive”)
AFAIK, punishments can’t be retroactive. Well, at least legal punishments.
If you think the anti abortion people care about legality, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They straight up intentionally misinterpret the bible saying you only need to pay a monetary fine for causing a miscarriage, and hallucinate that verse into capital punishment. (Of course the miscarriage rate in the year 0 was probably something like 90%, while even today only 2/3rds of pregnancies are even viable)
They have also implemented Flock cameras at two of the gun ranges that I attend.
You said if you could vote and that is the thing, we indeed can’t currently vote directly. That is if we support this fascism enforced through techno-capitalism, or not. So indeed this is something we need to change in the future, we do need to be able to vote for or against it and we must be able to do that directly. People enforcing this in society can’t hide behind economic system anymore and the process needs to be democratized.
Look, at least when it comes to our relationship with big tech, there’s a lot you can do. But people are addicted to convenience.
I’ve ever called a taxi using uber or bolt – I always call the local number. Yes, the horror, I need to speak to a human. Price is the same or even cheaper (no demand-adjusted pricing), and it works the same way.
And the list goes on. I also don’t have an account in amazon (last money I spent on them was glacier storage and I managed to move out a while back). I don’t know. You probably won’t be able to cut them off everywhere in your life, but probably different people could boycott different services and from then onwards it would be death by a thousand cuts.
Voting with wallets is hard when some people have much thicker wallets but we still got something.
No, that is not it. Currently there is a small group of people that is using economic system to enforce fascism, the same list of names keeps popping up, nobody gave them mandate to do so. It’s hence time we get to vote directly if some of their agendas are supported by society, or not. As you said that is rather convenient, for us, and we like convenience. We can simply get rid of some of that, by voting.
The problem isn’t sacrificing privacy for security, it is that we’re being asked to sacrifice privacy without actually gaining security.
As it is there are dozens and dozens of examples of police using Flock cameras for illegal purposes – stuff like stalking ex-girlfriends, stalking random women a cop might be attracted to, etc – and that’s just the examples that have been publicly admitted, basically after the victims figured out what was going on.
There is an unknown number of unreported cases, probably vastly outnumbering the reported cases, and like most police abuse, it is largely women and POC that are affected most.
You are right, but the root cause is not the cameras. Cameras are Ok, the people that use them are abusing them. So the correction should be not removing the means but educating the people who are using them. Just as these are not the guns that shoot people, and you should prevent shooting not by removing the guns (and leaving innocent people unprotected from the criminals that will obtain their guns by illegal means, since criminals don’t obey the laws, – that’s basically the main rule for becoming a criminal), it’s not the cameras that cause the problem.
Furthermore, I’ll say that having cameras in public are not the issue here. The issue is that these are not just cameras; It is a total AI-driven data scraping tool that just so happens to have cameras as endpoints. As far as I know, us in the United States never really voted to have these cameras not just installed, but also not having our tax dollars allocated to adding them. My tune would honestly be different if folks could view any of the cameras at any time, akin to surf cameras on beaches. My concern with these cameras and their data being secretive, we really don’t know the full capabilities of them. Sure, we can infer and we know what Flock has spoon-fed to the public, but we honestly don’t know what lurks in the firmware, data confidence, data retention on the system, etc.
I don’t share the same worldview as you. I believe majority of the world doesn’t. Think of it – technology is your only ally because everyone else sees that madness. IMHO you don’t think that 1984 – a total surveillance – is the solution; you only say that in desperation because you have nothing else.
Privacy is important to me. I won’t give it up because of some people who are hellbent on setting world on fire for own benefits. Knowing how all this works I will not even discuss any concessions. It would be simply naive.
Coming back to tiny unnoticeable surveillance carried by sheep and providing data to dragons – Apple shouldn’t be singled out here. There are many companies doing this. Not in the high-tech countries but in the countries with tremendous social issues. Think about that.
Do you walk around afraid of your own shadow? Surveillance only leads to abuse, and its own form of terrorism. Strapping camera’s to everyone’s face is only going to help those in power oppress those not more.
What if I told you that you have no right to privacy on the public street (or sidewalk)?
Cameras recording the public street have existed since a very long time, but suddenly, “cameras bad” because some people can’t do their “direct action” (aka domestic terrorism, aka arson and looting) without being caught on video.
The problem with putting cameras on AirPods is that they can be used to film private areas, so that’s something for social etiquette to take care of (much like some private venues have already banned the Meta glasses).
kurkosdr,
I’d be with you on this one, but for this recent instance with new cameras, things are a bit different
They are now installing the cameras into private locations, “with permission”. But that does not make it better. They are getting approvals from HOAs, apartment complexes and similar “management”, but of course not from individuals. Or using public roads but directing at private businesses, like gun ranges or clinics.
I’m not sure being “technically within the law while shirking the very principles of 4th amendment” is great.
There is actually precedent that Supreme Court will not like this
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf
But like every other government overreach it takes years if not a decade to be fixed.
Yes, that’s something the law should take care of if it hasn’t already. In the EU, we have much better privacy guardrails, for example, my country (Greece) had to make sure the network of cameras set up in the run up to the 2004 Olympics had viewing angles such that they couldn’t be used to spy on private spaces through windows.
But cameras used to film the public street aren’t bad as a concept.
kurkosdr,
It will get better, but things move extremely slowly here.
Again, Supreme Court found “geofence warrants” illegal… only 10 years or so late.
The problem is not really that. A street facing offline camera does no harm. You need a warrant to turn over the data. Someone has to do the legwork to track and investigate you.
The main issue here is that not that you are being recorded on the street, but because the mesh of cameras builds a 24/7 database of your whereabouts. This is the privacy violation, not the fact that you were filmed on the street. (as far as I understand)
Not different from hiring 100 people and scattering them around the neighborhood to report on your location. Your route on a public street or sidewalk is not a private matter.
That’s the WHOLE DIFFERENCE.
If a “””bad apple cop””” wants to figure out where his ex-girlfriends new partner lives, he can:
1. Log into Flock, type her name, filter by “most common locations”
OR
2. Convince a judge that his ex-girlfriend’s new partner is awful. Take the warrant to his supervisor. Convince someone who may not directly work with him to assign 100 detectives to follow his ex-girlfriend.
It’s a much higher barrier against abuse than “trust us bro”.
I think it’s fair to re-examine statements like “you ahve no right to privacy on a public street” when conditions change, because practical changes to people’s living conditions also change what things like “privacy” mean.
Just for instance: if this were 1990, I would agree that anyone who wants to take pictures of people on a public street ought to be able to do it. But if you’ve lived on Earth, or did in 1990, you’d also know that there’s a continuum of behavior where “taking pictures of people in public” can also be “harassment.” Celebrities have dealt with this for a long time and — just culturally — we’ve been OK with that because they are also mainly wealthy and famous and that reads as part of what they signed up for in order to become wealthy and famous.
The issue here isn’t really a privacy one, or at least not entirely a privacy issue. It’s what happens when private companies and local and national governments go paparazzi — that is, exercise what we understand to be their “right” to photograph public spaces, but in a way that does not serve the public interest.
It’s sort of like telemarketing, DDos attacks, etc. While, on one hand, you have the right to call or text anyone you want, or to ping any IP address you want, it’s also true that the coordinated exercise of those activities can have consequences that we ALSO agree you do not have the right to cause. Your right to call people, in other words, does not also give you the right to call people so often that you render our telephone infrastructure effectively useless. You have the right to hang out in a public park, but not to live there. And so on.
You can use the phrase “tragedy of the commons” for this, but it’s not really the same thing. In the case of e.g. Flock cameras and other online data harvesting, a big part of the issue is that this kind of data collection allows bad actors to do a lot of damage to people’s lives very, very quickly, and we have already seen examples of this in the form of e.g. cops doing some high-efficiency stalking. The problem with this is that while you can prosecute individuals you also don’t want to create conditions where the damage they do con’t be easily undone (e.g. the Experian SSN/credit history leaks). Like, someone starts building a hydrogen bomb in their garage, you don’t wait for it to go off before you arrest them.
It seems like you’ve already outlined where filming the public street stops and harassing starts, and where pinging IPs stops and DoSing starts, and the law has set those boundaries, so what’s the argument here?
Also, cops have the right to stalk you on the public street, in fact, they’ve been doing it since forever even before electronics came into existence by scattering around the city and recording your location and the time you were in that location.
The argument is that e.g. Carpenter v. United States (2018) the Supreme Court ruled that while you have a _reduced_ expectation of privacy in public, you still retain a right to privacy. You can’t e.g. have your movements through public spaces tracked by law enforcement in the absence of a warrant. To quote the EFF:
“In Carpenter, the court recognized that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of your physical movements, including your movements in public. It therefore held that the defendant had an expectation of privacy in 127 days worth of accumulated historical cell site location information (CSLI) […] Accessing this information intrudes on your private sphere, and the Fourth Amendment ordinarily requires the government to obtain a warrant in order to do so.
Importantly, you retain this expectation of privacy even when those records are collected while you’re in public.”
And so e.g. Law enforcement buying records from Flock would strike the layman as a clear violation of this ruling. Whether you can be recorded in public is one thing, and to what degree any party has the right to aggregate those recordings in order to e.g. track your movements without getting a warrant, that’s a separate issue.
The security argument for more camera falls apart instantly if there is no supporting and aligned infrastructure.
What’s the point of having 2000 camera on my street, when if a parcel is stolen from my doorstep the police shrug their shoulders? Or when someone gets pickpocketed in a public place, police shrug their shoulders.
Or when, or when, or when
Cameras in and of themselves provide no security at all.
In some offices there should be more cameras with citizen scrutiny.
I’m not keen on more wearable cameras either, but from what I’ve read the cameras in new AirPods are infra-red only. Which means grainy black and white images, probably only useful for object detection.
Why are glasses and airpods with cameras being singled out like this? It’s stupid!
Tiny hidden cameras exist, and have existed for a LONG time. A pervert is not going to wear a visible pair of camera equipped glasses, he’s going to have a camera hidden in something that doesn’t usually contain a camera.
Anyone who wants to be a pervert (or a journalist, or a spy, or an undercover cop etc) and secretly film someone has already been doing this for years.
It’s all about barrier of entry.
Microcameras used to be expensive, require a trained person to operate and conceal correctly, there was a cost to developing film, time to study it. Or if you are operating a tele lens, you would be following someone with a huge setup and attract some attention for sure.
OR
Warrants, assigning detectives, the whole weight of the CIA (or whichever state apparatus you like more).
vs.
A monster cluster of digital cameras sending data to an indexed system, you alone use your login, done.
Abuse is much easier when you are the only entry point and the only accountability point.
But that’s the whole point – a pair of meta glasses are NOT concealed. They are blatantly on the front of someone’s face and they are openly branded so you know exactly what they are. Anyone wearing them might as well be carrying around a full size movie camera on their shoulder.
If you see someone wearing meta glasses then you know they have a camera, exactly as if they were carrying a traditional camera, or a modern phone etc.
A concealed camera is quite different, and it’s concealed cameras that anyone with any nefarious purpose will have already been using long before meta glasses or google glass or anything like this became available.
The barrier of entry for concealed cameras is MUCH lower than it was years ago. This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with meta glasses, which are not a concealed camera.
Why don’t you consider meta glasses concealed cameras?
A Google Glass was not a concealed camera – the thing was bloody obvious.
The Meta glasses camera are concealed in the glasses frame!
Camera phones were also concealed cameras until they became commonplace. Also it’s way harder to shoot a photo with a phone in a concealed way (although there are ways) than shooting in a concealed way with Meta glasses.
Because they’re a well known and highly publicised product that people can recognise. They are openly advertised as containing cameras. There’s nothing concealed or hidden.
So I am not immediately against the idea of Airpods with cameras in them. These could be very useful for e.g. people with vision problems or other disabilities, people riding bikes on busy streets, etc. I can think of about a dozen applications where earbuds that narrate what their camera sees, or that respond to camera input, improve people’s lives in a way that existing technologies cannot.
It’s hard to tell at this point, but these also seem to be a different thing from Meta’s cuck glasses. Airpods can’t be aimed like a glasses or phone camera and are therefore more likely to produce video that is directly useful to a software process (that e.g. beeps when someone is approaching you from behind) but is much less directly useful to a human viewer.
The end goal of technology is to allow a very few to own and control the many. It’s already painfully obvious and funny in a tragic way most still can’t see it.
Of course the security camera lover could have been from anywhere in the world, yet he is from a very specific place where people making life hell for others are complaining about their own life being hell itself.
“Tiny cameras in tiny AirPods that can photograph anything in front of the user are a pervert’s wet dream. ”
As I understand it, the images themselves cannot be downloaded, at least until someone jailbreaks and hacks the device. Besides, how do you know that person in the locker room seaming talking on their iPhone (or any mobile) isn’t actually filming you?