Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where none of us is as smart as all of us. Now, it's been a minute, but you may remember this controversial ring ad from this year's Super Bowl. This is Milo. That's our family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Yeah, that one. Ring has gotten a ton of backlash for that ad because if their doorbell cameras can find dogs, obviously they could be used to find and track humans too, whether you want to be tracked or not. But it's not just Ring. Several companies are part of a growing network of surveillance in the United States, and many folks are worried about what this means for average Americans, particularly as more and more reporting comes out about how the federal government is using a variety of surveillance tools to assist in its mass deportation agenda. So for a check-in on our surveillance state, we've got Joseph Cox here to make us smart about this. He covers all things surveillance and technology at 404 Media. Joseph, welcome to the show. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. What was your reaction when you saw that ring ad? Cringe, mostly, and then the sort of terror set in. But mostly, I was looking at other people's reactions, right? I have never seen a backlash quite like that to really a technology advert, let alone a surveillance advert. I think this one just really resonated with people because it finally fulfilled the sort of dormant promise of ring cameras and, frankly, other surveillance technology as well, which is that no longer is this going to be a passive surveillance technology that just records stuff that's sort of happening in the background or outside your home. This is going to be turned into an active surveillance capability, which raised lots and lots of questions, I think, very rightly about, well, we're talking about dogs now. What are we going to be talking about in six months? So let's zoom out from just ring. How would you describe the overall state of the surveillance state in the United States? I would call it far reaching, wide, deep, and ever growing, frankly. And I would pull it in two main buckets. You have the stuff like ring, which are products or technologies that consumers have bought themselves, which are then maybe being turned into other surveillance capabilities that they may agree with or they may not. I would also put the company flock into that as well, where they run these AI-enabled cameras that constantly record the license plates of vehicles driving by and then cops can remotely access that data. The reason I put it into the same bucket as ring is because often that technology is actually sold to homeowners associations. It is HOAs that are buying that technology and setting it up because they want to surveil sort of their own field of operations much in the way that somebody buys a ring camera. Then on the other side, I would put the government stuff, the contractor stuff, the palanters, the location data being bought by ICE. And the reason that is so different today, or so I would say potent today, is that the context of surveillance in the United States has shifted because of ICE's mass deportation effort. Whereas before, investigative tools might just have been accessed by, I don't know, the FBI or Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of ICE, but they were focused on child abuse or cybercrime or money laundering or something like that. We now have this, obviously, very explicit mass deportation effort happening in the country. And surveillance technology is a key component of that to the point where we now have those two sectors, the sort of consumer surveillance and the government surveillance overlapping somewhat. I want to go back to Flock and thank you for bringing them up because after that Super Bowl fiasco, Ring ended a planned partnership with Flock. Talk a little bit more about that company. I get that they scan license plates and that, I guess, is a way that you can track how someone is moving anywhere and in and out of the space, but also it can track a person across their lives, right? Yeah, Flock is a very interesting company. Firstly, for the automatic license plate readers that you brought up, the ALPR cameras, not only do they scan vehicles driving by, but really Flock's sort of attractiveness to law enforcement is that it has this national lookup tool. So you could be an officer in, say, Texas, and one of your suspects or whoever you're tracking drives across the country or even flies, say to California and then starts renting a car there. An officer in Texas can track them across the country because that is the entire point of Flock that you can tap into the system and follow a target vehicle wherever they've been. And we've shown that's actually being used by ICE indirectly. Local police have done lookups on behalf of ICE. We've also seen that a woman who self-administered at abortion was tracked as well by an officer in Texas. So you have that part of the company. The other part of Flock is they try to bring all of the surveillance technology into what police like to call a single pane of glass. So they have all of these fancy toys and gadgets and drones and cameras and all of that. But they want to look at it on one monitor, on one interface and Flock allows them to do that. That was the intention of the Ring partnership that Ring footage could go into Flock and then police will be able to look at it that way. But clearly Flock is frankly so toxic in the public perception now, partly because of our reporting that Ring and Flock couldn't even get that partnership off the ground. How much has the increased immigration enforcement changed the way that the federal government uses surveillance technology? It has changed it in that they are now marrying together all sorts of different technologies and especially different sets of data. So of course, everybody really has heard of Palantir. It's something of a sort of a bogeyman in a lot of people's imaginations. Palantir doesn't really actually do that much rather than just bring together data that's usually siloed away. And that is what is happening during this mass deportation effort. You will have ICE using data from DHS and Customs and Border Protection. Then they're also getting access to Medicaid patient data. I've also reported they have access to a huge database of medical insurance claims as well. And whereas before all of that data was separate, it was with this agency over here, this company over here, it is now being pulled all together at once in effort of this mass deportation effort. I've never quite seen a part of the US government marry data in the way it is today. You know, not even in the context of counterterrorism, domestic or international. Here it is so much more explicit that we're going to take data from this place and we're going to use it for this purpose. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more on this with Joseph Cox from 404 Media. The world moves fast. You work day, even faster pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 co pilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize. So you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at Microsoft.com slash M 365 co pilot. All right, we are back with 404 Media's Joseph Cox. And, you know, I want to talk now about artificial intelligence. How much has AI changed surveillance technology over the past few years? It's simultaneously changed a lot, and then also not much at all. I'll get the latter one out of the way in that there is a lot of hype with AI in the surveillance industry, where they will take chatbots similar to chatgbt or Anthropics, clod, and they will put those into their surveillance tools. And that will allow law enforcement to, hey, summarize this data for me, take this location information and show me something interesting about this device or whatever it may be. Maybe that has some benefits, but also frankly, a seasoned investigator would be able to do those sorts of tasks anyway. So I kind of put that in the hype bucket. Where AI has been useful is the sort of technology like Flock that they produce, where it is so good at recognizing objects now, different entities, different vehicles. And I mean, something that frankly, probably gets lost in our coverage, we don't highlight it as much as we should do, because it really depends on the story. But Flock cameras are also capable of identifying types of people. That is, a law enforcement investigator can type in, show me all of the video footage of a male wearing a green hoodie and a red baseball cap, for instance. Now, Flock will say, we don't track people. I think that is splitting hairs. You are looking for a very specific person there. And of course, that sort of surveillance is powered by artificial intelligence or machine learning or whatever you want to call it. It's just not the sort of chat GPT AI that we mostly think about today. And I think the Flock stuff is more insidious. And frankly, it's more powerful. So it feels like right now, many people in the United States, myself included, feel like we're just being watched constantly. You know, you think your phone is listening to you, probably is, you could be recorded anytime you're in public, either with a Flock camera or Palantir is gathering your data or somebody's ring camera is capturing you just casually walking down the street and that's going somewhere. What do you think all of the surveillance and our awareness of it, especially as that awareness is growing, is doing to us as a society? I mean, frankly, it's exhausting. I completely understand surveillance fatigue, where people essentially just give up where they'll say something like, well, there is no privacy anymore, so I'm not going to do anything. And I understand the sentiment and I understand that that can lead to people making decisions where maybe they will decide just to give up some of their privacy, because they think it's completely fruitless anyway. I would push back against it, though. I would say privacy is not dead. There are concrete things you can do depending on the sort of surveillance you're trying to avoid. But really, it does boil down to what information are you trying to protect and specifically from who? So are you trying to stop Palantir getting some of your data? Are you not wanting Flock or another camera company from following your locations and that being accessed without a warrant? Are you trying to protect the location of your phone from really marketers, advertising companies or government agencies that may also access it without a warrant? It really does, unfortunately, depend on the specifics and people have to read up on those. And I totally understand that's a really tall order. We are also busy. We have our normal lives to get on with. We don't have time to read a thousand words on foreign media about how to avoid a particular type of surveillance. But frankly, there are ways to take back your privacy. It just requires work and effort. Obviously, people need to go to 404 media and check out your work to get some of those guidelines on how to protect your privacy. But are there any quick tips that you can give us for what we as regular people can do to reduce how much were surveilled or how much were caught up in this dragnet? The two main points I give are the first about location data. Just be very cautious about when you have location services on or what apps you give it to. The reason I bring that up is because there is this whole shadowy industry of these data brokers and middlemen companies that buy location data from phones and then sell it to all sorts of other organizations or government agencies as well. So just be careful when you download a video game on your phone. Do I really need to give that my location data access? That's the first one. The second one is a little bit more intensive. But you know, whenever you're signing up to sort of a throwaway service, just don't use your real email address. Why give away your sort of sensitive and identifiable email address to that random website, you're trying to get a 10% off or something else, just use sort of a garbage throwaway email address. And I use a different email for every single service I sign up to because you can do that through Apple iCloud. But you can also just go make a hotmail or a Gmail or an Outlook or whatever and just use that as sort of your junk spammy email. And it's not going to stop, you know, high tech surveillance or anything like that. But it's going to result in you not being in so many, you know, data breaches or just weird marketers being able to follow you across the internet. It's wild that this is falling on the consumer. Is there nothing that is being done at either the state or federal level to protect consumers privacy? I think that's a really, really good point. There is no federal privacy law in the United States. There is very unlikely to be one in the near or even medium term future. In California, more laws have been passed around privacy where you can send an email or a letter or phone up, I think sometimes a company and demand they delete your data, for example, is very similar to what happens in Europe with the GDPR there. But it's just a California version. So if anybody is in that state and they're able to do that, that's something that can be exercised as well. But beyond sort of lawmakers and regulation, frankly, I would put more pressure on the tech companies themselves as well. You know, the Googles and the apples of the world, they make the fundamental platform, that is, of course, the mobile phones and the operating systems, that a lot of this surveillance is based on. And perhaps they could do a better job of removing shady apps or stopping weird advertisements, siphoning people's data. I think there should be more emphasis on those companies as well. Well, Joseph Cox, thank you so much. Joseph is an investigative journalist and co-founder of 404 Media. You've given us a ton of great information. Thank you for making us smart. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much. That's it for us today. We'd love to hear your thoughts on surveillance in this country. Leave us a voicemail at 508UBSMART or email us at makemesmartatmarketplace.org. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Berkseeker. Today's program was engineered by John Focke. Ben Toladay and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our supervisory senior producer is Daisy Palacios. Nancy Fargali is executive producer of Marketplace Shows and Marketplace's vice president and general manager is Neil Scarborough. Why do we keep putting off the financial tasks we know we need to do? I'm Rima Gires and this week on my podcast This Is Uncomfortable, I talk with a behavioral expert about commitment devices, the tricks we can use to force ourselves to follow through. The most extreme form of commitment device is literally saying you're going to find yourself. Like I'm going to have to give $50 to a politician's campaign who I hate if I haven't done this by next Friday. Listen to This Is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.
