Citizens looking for security and privacy are about to get neither.
Citizens looking for security and privacy are about to get neither.
R ecently uncovered internal documents from technology giant Meta tell a story more horrifying than all the Nightmare on Elm Street films combined: The company is planning to bring facial-recognition technology to its artificial-intelligence-powered eyeglasses. That means when you’re wearing the glasses you can not only film the people you’re looking at, but the AI will also feed you information about the person in your line of sight.
Such technology, of course, would be a stalker’s dream. See a woman minding her own business at a Starbucks? Just look her over and suddenly, you have her name, address, social media history, pictures of her dogs, and videos of her doing tequila shots on her last vacation.
It is all part of the deliberate effort by tech companies to inure us to living our lives eternally on the grid. In 2021, Facebook, now owned by Meta, shut down a facial-recognition system after it sparked public outrage and an eventual lawsuit. Five years later, in an era when more people are comfortable living their lives online, the company seems to think spy-maxxing is a hot trend.
The idea of a society in which everyone has internet-enabled cameras strapped to their faces represents a quandary for libertarians and other freedom-loving Americans. Of course, private companies should be free to push forward technological advances. Otherwise, kids today would still have to ask someone to prom by dialing the number on a landline phone, awkwardly saying hello to the parent who answers, and nervously stumbling through a prom-posal. Innovation is good; as Calvin Coolidge noted, “the chief business of the American people is business.”
But what happens when those private businesses garner enough power to subject us to a surveillance state? And what will they do with the data once they have video of every American grocery shopping, sneaking out of work early to see Bugonia, or throwing a fit in the hardware store? Once everyone is a pocket Spielberg, there is no opting out, unless you simply never leave your house.
The answer, at least partially, lies in what happens to that data once it is collected. And that is where the story gets even more unsettling.
Consider what happened in the weeks surrounding this year’s Super Bowl. Ring cameras, the Amazon-owned home-security devices that have become as common as mailboxes in American neighborhoods, were used to track the movements of dogs that had gone missing or been stolen in the chaos surrounding game-day gatherings. On its face, it sounds almost wholesome: neighbors banding together, pooling doorbell footage to find lost pets.
But the implications are worth sitting with for a moment. A network of privately owned cameras, installed by individual homeowners who thought they were protecting their own property, had quietly become a community surveillance grid capable of tracking movement block by block, in real time, without any formal law enforcement involvement. If these cameras can find Rufus the beagle, they can certainly find you.
Now imagine that footage in the hands of someone who does not have your best interests at heart.
Here is the thing that tech companies do not put in the brochure: private does not mean protected. The government has well-established legal mechanisms to compel private companies to hand over the data they collect on you. A subpoena, a national security letter, a court order — and suddenly, all that footage Ring promised was yours becomes a federal exhibit.
This is not a hypothetical. Amazon has complied with law enforcement requests for Ring data without user consent. Meta has handed over user information to authorities. Google knows more about your daily routine than your spouse does, and it has proven quite cooperative when the right paperwork arrives.
And now the stakes are getting considerably higher, as the U.S. government ratchets up the amount of data it seeks. The Department of Defense — rebranded by the current administration as the Department of War — is actively pursuing AI partnerships with private technology companies for weapons development and battlefield applications. When Anthropic, owner of the AI interface Claude, expressed misgivings about partnering with the DOD, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quickly signed a deal with Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI. Hegseth then designated Anthropic a “security risk” and cut it off from working with the U.S. government.
The pattern here is not subtle. Private companies collect the data. The government compels access to it. The data get fed into systems that are opaque to us, for purposes we are not consulted on, in ways that cannot be undone. The surveillance state does not need to build its own infrastructure when it can simply harvest what Silicon Valley has already constructed, at enormous profit, with your enthusiastic participation.
This is the bargain we have been slowly accepting, one terms-of-service agreement at a time. The free email. The discounted security camera. The payment websites that plaster your financial transactions online for all your “friends” to see. Each of these products is, in isolation, a convenience. In aggregate, they are the architecture of observation that would have made the East German Stasi weep with envy.
Libertarians are right that private companies should be free to innovate. But the freedom that matters most is yours — your freedom to move through the world without being catalogued, cross-referenced, and filed away for future use by parties you will never meet, for purposes you will never know. When private innovation systematically erodes that freedom, the ideological question becomes less about markets and more about what kind of society we actually want to live in.