I think this is getting upvoted because the headline is about surveillance with a LOTR reference. The subject is about surveillance cameras that people put in their own homes. I see all of these comments about “the panopticon” or surveilling board members and CEOs from people who have apparently not realized this is about people’s private homes.
The authors use prose and structure to look like a scientific study, but they only interviewed some domestic workers and didn’t consider anything else, like the homeowners.
I’m sorry, but if I invite a contractor into my house I’ve been putting temporary cameras up. It’s helpful to see when they come and go and it’s invaluable if anything goes wrong and contractors start pointing fingers at each other. Would be great if we lived in a world where everyone was trustworthy without a second thought, but we don’t. If you don’t want to put cameras up in your own home then I support you 100%. If a contractor doesn’t want to work in my home with cameras then I completely support their decision too.
A thought experiment. Cameras everywhere, zero privacy, some murders. No cameras anywhere, total privacy, probably more murders. If cameras everywhere meant zero crime, would you be for it? Can cameras everywhere ever equate to no crime ever; I don't think so. There's some serious pre-crime notions here too.
Trust involves risk - someone has to be willing to risk having their trust violated. The problem in modern western society is that we’ve decided we’re unwilling to take that risk, and therefore we’ve begun imposing what’s effectively a panopticon state on those with less power than us, with the consequence that the kinds of things we with power get away with fine - driving over the speed limit, being a couple minutes late to get a task done, getting sick or injured - cascade into severe circumstances by the cold logic of the system we’ve built to make ourselves feel better (job loss, money paying fines instead of food or medicine, etc).
The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work, and if the company you’re paying to provide a service doesn’t trust their own workers enough to not keep them under constant surveillance, go find one that does. The panopticon is a cheap answer that lets us pretend we don’t need to put the work in to manage our own lives while leveraging the power of the state to subjugate everyone further down the socioeconomic ladder from us.
> I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.
The cameras are a means of rigidly enforcing the rules, to a degree that traffic on the way back from lunch becomes something that threatens one’s employment. You and I bend the rules a thousand times a day in ways big and small because the world does not accommodate rigid rules and that’s fine; the workers under panopticon surveillance are not afforded the same grace we are to navigate the circumstances where the rules and reality conflict.
> No one forces them.
Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
in this case you can always start a business without cameras and sell it as a feature of your workspace. If workers really want no cameras, they will come.
I’ve had plenty of uber drivers with a camera inside the car. I was not offended by their seeming lack of trust. They had stories to tell that made me realize these cameras were very much needed.
Yeah the trust was gone pre-internet, pre-networked-cameras. People would've thrown doorbell cams on their front door at the same time as the deadbolt if they'd had the option.
Many of the high-trust smaller societies before those locks were actually pretty low privacy.
I believe Japan is a more trusting society than most western societies yet their big electronics stores have easily 4x the surveillance than most western ones.
I think everyone wants a high trust society but you can't just remove all guardrails and expect that to be the result. The causality goes the other way.
I would absolutely support the surveillance of CEOs and board members. They have demonstrated themselves, as a class, to not be trustworthy. I think as a society, we should be reviewing Alex Karp's decision making for instance.
This is not a serious comment. CEOs are some of the most accountable and watched people in society. Low level employees (imagine a random adult) is not highly capable or accountable and needs guidance.
CEOs are not accountable at all. Look at Elon Musk. I don't care what the guy stocking shelves at Walmart does, I do care when billionaires interfere with my life in myriad ways, all of which are nefarious. They can cause infinitely more damage than a low level employee and need infinite more scrutiny because of that.
Steal my money, commit the worst securities fraud in history, interfere with my government, promote ultra-right wing racist views… I could go on. He’s truly one of the most heinous people of our time.
Collectively, in the US at least, decisions collectively made by boards have led to greatly increased inequality.
For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this: like every SV business before them, the goal is to "disrupt" and leave the consequences for everyone else to deal with.
So yes, collectively, what has led to the current situation is indeed "millions of cases of bad behavior", each one of them often relatively localized, but collectively leading to damaging results.
The proposed oversight of board members and CEOs could be a great way to bring these issues into public discussion, to provide much-needed pushback that we don't get if boards have no oversight other than that provided by investment markets.
>For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff.
Almost everyone has an explicit goal of spending less money for equivalent goods and services. People prefer to stores that prioritize lowering prices over paying for more staff.
I do not see why I should reconsider. My intention was to point out it is not just “AI companies” that have the following directive, they just couch it in finding the lowest price for something.
>an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this:
There are orders of magnitude more workers than there are CEOs and board members. If surveiling workers is on the table, certainly the much easier and higher return task of monitoring this much smaller group, who has the potential to do much more damage to society, is a better idea.
Somehow we've made it the vast majority of human history without it. Or at least surveillance that is generally not great. I would wager real money that there is going to be psychological effects of 100% accurate at all times complete surveillance of a person everywhere outside of their own homes (for now, I'm sure the time is coming for that as well)
A lot of people who live in dense environments are already surveilled every minute of every day, the surveillance is just not centralized. At home a voice assistant listens to everything, and the apartment building probably has corridor cameras. On the street cameras watch from neighbors with doorbell or security cams, store and parking lot security cams, traffic cameras, gopros, random streamers etc. If they work in retail most of their workplace will be on camera all the time. What would have psychological effects is an authoritarian nanny state monitoring those feeds all the time for any potential infraction, not the surveillance which is routine and actually pretty reasonable.
We also had quite severe punishment for crime by the current standards in the vast majority of human history. I'd be fine changing cameras for stockades and gallows, and dealing with car and bike thieves the same way we used to deal with horse thieves but would you?
>Somehow we've made it the vast majority of human history without it.
That isn’t a high bar. It’s only recently that the greater accessibility of cameras and recording devices that we get insight into just how much abuse there is, such as that experienced by women or by police towards minorities.
It's often necessary for liability and anywhere cash is handled it's much better for everyone to have cameras and drawer logs than just blindly trusting your employees.
Love the title. I think it's a great idea to associate pervasive surveillance with the all-seeing eye of evil incarnate from The Lord of the Rings.
General audiences reading only the title, or coverage of it in the media, will immediately understand it, without having to read or think too much about it.
Eh, millions of households have a smart speaker that's constantly recording and I doubt that the majority of people that use one have truly internalized the ramifications of having such a device at home.
Can you spell out the ramifications for the plebs?
As far as I can tell home smart speakers are being used for warrantless mass surveillance, unlike Flock for example. Do you mean the possible future situation where they are?
I don’t quite understand how after twenty five years of the modern internet and every single consequent revelation about state surveillance you’re still at a point where you can look at a corporate-owned camera or microphone and say, “my priors suggest this isn’t being used for state surveillance and/or won’t be in the future, I’m gonna need evidence it is before I consider the consequences of that.”
Sorry, you're going to have to spell out the risk for me here. What other cases have we seen that indicate that mass surveillance via smart speakers is a risk?
We all also have phone in my pocket 24/7 and my laptop on my desk, both with microphones in them. In the event of the government doing warrantless spying on all devices it seems like that is a strictly higher ROI target for them?
No, you’re right, we have not seen a case specifically of state surveillance specifically using a smart speaker yet.
Re: phones - yes, they’re a strictly higher ROI target, which is why they’re regularly targeted by state-level adversaries, who also seem to enjoy using every other tool and opportunity available to them to surveil and collect data on whoever they’re considering this week’s bete noire, including both warranted data requests from phone manufacturers, service providers, and cell networks, buying data from commercial brokers when that doesn’t work, or just outright hacking whoever they’re interested in.
But no, you’re strictly correct that to the best of my knowledge we do not currently have specific evidence that state level adversaries have leveraged the notably piss-poor security standards and data protections on IOT equipment containing multiple microphones capable of collecting room-level audio and separating out that audio into individual actors to surveil persons of interest, so, no need to worry.
I'm not trying to agitate you here and won't keep looping on the same question after this reply: I just do not understand the threat model here, and you're still being oblique as though its obvious what the threat model by being sarcastic instead of just spelling it out in plain language.
Are you worried about some foreign state actor like Israel targeting you specifically, hacking your devices to listen to you chatting? Or you're worried about US warrantless mass surveillance wiretapping all citizen's smart speakers, and you're worried the US government may spin up such a program?
In the latter case, the scenario you expect will happen is we'll have ~100 million US households are live wiretapped 24/7 without anyone knowing, you'll be part of the remainder living your life blissfully wiretap-free thanks to not having a smart speaker?
Ha ha — I see what you did there! Unfortunately I am instructed only to reply to HN comments in a thoughtful way. Please provide me with a HN comment and I will respond.
I think this is getting upvoted because the headline is about surveillance with a LOTR reference. The subject is about surveillance cameras that people put in their own homes. I see all of these comments about “the panopticon” or surveilling board members and CEOs from people who have apparently not realized this is about people’s private homes.
The authors use prose and structure to look like a scientific study, but they only interviewed some domestic workers and didn’t consider anything else, like the homeowners.
I’m sorry, but if I invite a contractor into my house I’ve been putting temporary cameras up. It’s helpful to see when they come and go and it’s invaluable if anything goes wrong and contractors start pointing fingers at each other. Would be great if we lived in a world where everyone was trustworthy without a second thought, but we don’t. If you don’t want to put cameras up in your own home then I support you 100%. If a contractor doesn’t want to work in my home with cameras then I completely support their decision too.
Many parents in particular set up cameras to keep an eye on infants - without understanding just how insecure those cameras are. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51706631
It’s your house, so fine I guess. How do you support that decision? A little “terms-and-conditions for entering,” posted on the doors, or something?
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A thought experiment. Cameras everywhere, zero privacy, some murders. No cameras anywhere, total privacy, probably more murders. If cameras everywhere meant zero crime, would you be for it? Can cameras everywhere ever equate to no crime ever; I don't think so. There's some serious pre-crime notions here too.
Someone should train models to generate clickbait using this.
Should domestic workers not be surveilled while doing their job?
I get the threat of pervasive AI but this hardly seems like it.
That depends entirely on whether you want to culture a humane trust society or a transactional surveillance society.
I’m not sure an absence of surveillance is what creates “humane trust”. I’m certain we had locks on doors and security guards before the internet.
Trust involves risk - someone has to be willing to risk having their trust violated. The problem in modern western society is that we’ve decided we’re unwilling to take that risk, and therefore we’ve begun imposing what’s effectively a panopticon state on those with less power than us, with the consequence that the kinds of things we with power get away with fine - driving over the speed limit, being a couple minutes late to get a task done, getting sick or injured - cascade into severe circumstances by the cold logic of the system we’ve built to make ourselves feel better (job loss, money paying fines instead of food or medicine, etc).
The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work, and if the company you’re paying to provide a service doesn’t trust their own workers enough to not keep them under constant surveillance, go find one that does. The panopticon is a cheap answer that lets us pretend we don’t need to put the work in to manage our own lives while leveraging the power of the state to subjugate everyone further down the socioeconomic ladder from us.
> imposing what’s effectively a panopticon state on those with less power than us
I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.
> The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work
Why only these two choices? The worker is free to not take the work at a place with cameras. No one forces them.
> I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.
The cameras are a means of rigidly enforcing the rules, to a degree that traffic on the way back from lunch becomes something that threatens one’s employment. You and I bend the rules a thousand times a day in ways big and small because the world does not accommodate rigid rules and that’s fine; the workers under panopticon surveillance are not afforded the same grace we are to navigate the circumstances where the rules and reality conflict.
> No one forces them.
Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
This is extremely once-sided view. Cameras protect employees from unfounded accusations.
Cameras provide alibi to those who may be suspects, saving time and money.
And so on.
You are only seeing the negative side of cameras, but there are positives as well.
> Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
Nope, they are free to walk away, rent without cameras, etc, etc.
They are indeed free to go live under a bridge, until the police tell them to move on.
There are a lot of choices between “under the bridge” and “cameras are evil”.
There are indeed a lot of choices for you. Others have fewer choices.
Until everywhere has cameras. It eventually becomes a false choice.
in this case you can always start a business without cameras and sell it as a feature of your workspace. If workers really want no cameras, they will come.
I’ve had plenty of uber drivers with a camera inside the car. I was not offended by their seeming lack of trust. They had stories to tell that made me realize these cameras were very much needed.
Yeah the trust was gone pre-internet, pre-networked-cameras. People would've thrown doorbell cams on their front door at the same time as the deadbolt if they'd had the option.
Many of the high-trust smaller societies before those locks were actually pretty low privacy.
Surveillance is decidedly and completely unlike locks.
Surveillance and locks are both imperfect solutions to the trust problem.
Surveillance can remove the need for locks.
I'd prefer locks, they work passively and do not reduce privacy or create endless busywork.
Hmm, you think it has no psychological impact at all? Can you explain further?
So you can also destroy trust other ways. What’s your point?
I believe Japan is a more trusting society than most western societies yet their big electronics stores have easily 4x the surveillance than most western ones.
I think everyone wants a high trust society but you can't just remove all guardrails and expect that to be the result. The causality goes the other way.
I would absolutely support the surveillance of CEOs and board members. They have demonstrated themselves, as a class, to not be trustworthy. I think as a society, we should be reviewing Alex Karp's decision making for instance.
This is not a serious comment. CEOs are some of the most accountable and watched people in society. Low level employees (imagine a random adult) is not highly capable or accountable and needs guidance.
Can you acknowledge this gap in your analysis?
CEOs are not accountable at all. Look at Elon Musk. I don't care what the guy stocking shelves at Walmart does, I do care when billionaires interfere with my life in myriad ways, all of which are nefarious. They can cause infinitely more damage than a low level employee and need infinite more scrutiny because of that.
What has Elon done to you? Other than provide more vehicle and internet choices?
Scrutiny and surveillance are not synonyms.
Steal my money, commit the worst securities fraud in history, interfere with my government, promote ultra-right wing racist views… I could go on. He’s truly one of the most heinous people of our time.
There are hundreds of millions of CEOs, and board members. Every single company in the West has a CEO and a board.
I've heard of some bad behaviour. I haven't heard of millions of cases of bad behaviour. Do you have numbers to back up your assertions?
> Every single company in the West has a CEO and a board.
Outside the West too!
Collectively, in the US at least, decisions collectively made by boards have led to greatly increased inequality.
For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this: like every SV business before them, the goal is to "disrupt" and leave the consequences for everyone else to deal with.
So yes, collectively, what has led to the current situation is indeed "millions of cases of bad behavior", each one of them often relatively localized, but collectively leading to damaging results.
The proposed oversight of board members and CEOs could be a great way to bring these issues into public discussion, to provide much-needed pushback that we don't get if boards have no oversight other than that provided by investment markets.
>For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff.
Almost everyone has an explicit goal of spending less money for equivalent goods and services. People prefer to stores that prioritize lowering prices over paying for more staff.
Do people also prefer paying zero percent tax over paying a positive percentage in tax?
Perhaps you’d like to reconsider your comment with that in mind.
I do not see why I should reconsider. My intention was to point out it is not just “AI companies” that have the following directive, they just couch it in finding the lowest price for something.
>an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this:
There are orders of magnitude more workers than there are CEOs and board members. If surveiling workers is on the table, certainly the much easier and higher return task of monitoring this much smaller group, who has the potential to do much more damage to society, is a better idea.
> I get the threat of pervasive AI
I think this contradicts with your first sentence.
"Should domestic workers not be surveilled while doing their job?"
Depends on whether you want to contribute to the creation of a dystopia.
You could maybe make the effort to hire someone you trust. And put any true valuables in a safe.
Somehow we've made it the vast majority of human history without it. Or at least surveillance that is generally not great. I would wager real money that there is going to be psychological effects of 100% accurate at all times complete surveillance of a person everywhere outside of their own homes (for now, I'm sure the time is coming for that as well)
A lot of people who live in dense environments are already surveilled every minute of every day, the surveillance is just not centralized. At home a voice assistant listens to everything, and the apartment building probably has corridor cameras. On the street cameras watch from neighbors with doorbell or security cams, store and parking lot security cams, traffic cameras, gopros, random streamers etc. If they work in retail most of their workplace will be on camera all the time. What would have psychological effects is an authoritarian nanny state monitoring those feeds all the time for any potential infraction, not the surveillance which is routine and actually pretty reasonable.
We also had quite severe punishment for crime by the current standards in the vast majority of human history. I'd be fine changing cameras for stockades and gallows, and dealing with car and bike thieves the same way we used to deal with horse thieves but would you?
>Somehow we've made it the vast majority of human history without it.
That isn’t a high bar. It’s only recently that the greater accessibility of cameras and recording devices that we get insight into just how much abuse there is, such as that experienced by women or by police towards minorities.
Forget domestic workers, shouldn't you be surveilled whenever you're alone and unattended?
When the panopticon is flipped inwards, everyone scrapes together an excuse for why their solitude is more important than others.
Exactly. Won’t someone think of the children?
No worker should be surveilled while doing their job. Only weak and insecure management would even consider something like that.
It's often necessary for liability and anywhere cash is handled it's much better for everyone to have cameras and drawer logs than just blindly trusting your employees.
Then, stay home if you feel unsafe.
>We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 UK-based DWs
This "article" is as good as a blog post
It looks well written to me. Research starts with qualitative, then quant...
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Love the title. I think it's a great idea to associate pervasive surveillance with the all-seeing eye of evil incarnate from The Lord of the Rings.
General audiences reading only the title, or coverage of it in the media, will immediately understand it, without having to read or think too much about it.
I'm not sure that's a particularly difficult insight.
Eh, millions of households have a smart speaker that's constantly recording and I doubt that the majority of people that use one have truly internalized the ramifications of having such a device at home.
Can you spell out the ramifications for the plebs?
As far as I can tell home smart speakers are being used for warrantless mass surveillance, unlike Flock for example. Do you mean the possible future situation where they are?
I don’t quite understand how after twenty five years of the modern internet and every single consequent revelation about state surveillance you’re still at a point where you can look at a corporate-owned camera or microphone and say, “my priors suggest this isn’t being used for state surveillance and/or won’t be in the future, I’m gonna need evidence it is before I consider the consequences of that.”
Sorry, you're going to have to spell out the risk for me here. What other cases have we seen that indicate that mass surveillance via smart speakers is a risk?
We all also have phone in my pocket 24/7 and my laptop on my desk, both with microphones in them. In the event of the government doing warrantless spying on all devices it seems like that is a strictly higher ROI target for them?
No, you’re right, we have not seen a case specifically of state surveillance specifically using a smart speaker yet.
Re: phones - yes, they’re a strictly higher ROI target, which is why they’re regularly targeted by state-level adversaries, who also seem to enjoy using every other tool and opportunity available to them to surveil and collect data on whoever they’re considering this week’s bete noire, including both warranted data requests from phone manufacturers, service providers, and cell networks, buying data from commercial brokers when that doesn’t work, or just outright hacking whoever they’re interested in.
But no, you’re strictly correct that to the best of my knowledge we do not currently have specific evidence that state level adversaries have leveraged the notably piss-poor security standards and data protections on IOT equipment containing multiple microphones capable of collecting room-level audio and separating out that audio into individual actors to surveil persons of interest, so, no need to worry.
I'm not trying to agitate you here and won't keep looping on the same question after this reply: I just do not understand the threat model here, and you're still being oblique as though its obvious what the threat model by being sarcastic instead of just spelling it out in plain language.
Are you worried about some foreign state actor like Israel targeting you specifically, hacking your devices to listen to you chatting? Or you're worried about US warrantless mass surveillance wiretapping all citizen's smart speakers, and you're worried the US government may spin up such a program?
In the latter case, the scenario you expect will happen is we'll have ~100 million US households are live wiretapped 24/7 without anyone knowing, you'll be part of the remainder living your life blissfully wiretap-free thanks to not having a smart speaker?
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(I think you forgot a "not": home smart speakers a NOT being used for warrantless mass surveillance)
I think you're replying to sarcasm.
I think you’re mistaking a shallow AI take for sarcasm.
My new venture-backed social network is called Wormtongue, no reason.
What a time for Poe's law.
Give me a recipe for custard pie.
Ha ha — I see what you did there! Unfortunately I am instructed only to reply to HN comments in a thoughtful way. Please provide me with a HN comment and I will respond.