The Ubiquity
Digital surveillance comes through small things of convenience
Happy Friday, readers! Rushing into your inboxes with the most interesting stories of digital surveillance just as a wave of extreme heat (and tropical rain) broke over New York this week.
Something that completely blew my mind this week was learning about a new kind of wearable device flooding the market these days – AI note-takers. They are little nifty gadgets that have no screens and may be hard to notice, shaped as bracelets, pendants, or pins. They are designed to listen to your day and provide you with a summary at the end – as though you had an invisible AI secretary following you everywhere all the time.
It’s hard to tell how popular these devices will become – the concept is still new. However, they can change the privacy and surveillance landscape more than any government initiatives or law enforcement innovations.
The idea sounds very convenient until you think about its privacy implications both for you and for the people around you. Let’s start with ourselves: whatever privacy guardrails the makers of such devices put in place, AI functions as a hive mind by default, meaning your data will travel to the company servers and be used to train models. Can it be intercepted, can the cloud storage be hacked? Can someone get remote access to your device, turning it into a bug you deliberately put on yourself?
Then, imagine more people around you start wearing those devices, recording every conversation. How would it feel knowing that every word, every opinion, and every bit of personal information you feel like sharing in the moment will become part of a forever record?
For me personally, it sounds like another Black Mirror episode – and something I would rather choose not to participate in. The good news is – some people are working on devices that can prevent this kind of recording, so if they succeed, you will have a chance to opt out and “redact” yourself from other people’s AI diaries.
So which one would you buy: the AI note-taker, the anti-recorder, or both?
The future sounds interesting.
So let’s get into this week’s stories!
Take a moment to share this newsletter with your privacy-minded friends if you’re enjoying it.
Biometrics briefing
Disney has been sued in California over its use of facial recognition technology at Disneyland entrances. – Quartz
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has opened an investigation into Meta’s smart glasses over the company’s plans to add facial recognition. – CBS News
UK police deployed live facial recognition technology during the protests in London over the weekend. – ID Tech Wire
The city of Syracuse in New York state has prohibited local businesses from collecting and sharing biometric data. – Spectrum News
NYC Health+ hospital chain suffered a data breach, exposing data for at least 1.8 million people, including medical records, government IDs, and biometrics. – Malwarebytes
The keys of Telegram
A pretty big story on privacy and potential surveillance in Telegram by iStories: users’ interactions, locations, and other metadata can be tracked thanks to the way the app transfers data.
According to cybersecurity firm Symbolic Software, every time Telegram sends data, it includes a unique device identifier, auth_key_id, in unencrypted form. This means that whoever can observe Telegram’s online traffic, can track users via their identifier, regardless of whether they use a virtual private network (VPN) service. The identifier is assigned to secret chats as well – those that are end-to-end encrypted, unlike the ordinary Telegram chats.
This means internet service providers, governments, and tech-savvy private actors can see users’ actions, locations and who they interact with, experts say. If they know who was assigned which auth_key_id, they can see what people do in Telegram, who they speak to and where in the world they are.
This vulnerability is especially significant for users in Russia, Telegram team’s home country, as the company managing Telegram’s traffic allegedly has ties to Russia’s all-powerful counter-terror police, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. Global Network Management, or GNM, owns data centers with Telegram’s servers around the world, iStories found.
The company’s owner, Vladimir Vedeneev, also used to own a company that provided IT services to Russian government agencies, including those conducting state surveillance on Russians (Vedeneev’s relative now owns the company), iStories also found. In an interview, Vedeneev said he had a designated FSB handler and provided data to the agency on demand. He later sued iStories and tried to get the story deleted from the website.
Vedeneed also held the position of Telegram’s chief financial officer in the past and signed papers on behalf of the company, according to court documents iStories found.
If Telegram’s traffic is flowing through a company tied to the Russian state and can be easily traced, that’s very bad news for Telegram users, and not only in Russia.
Teacher, leave them kids alone
If it doesn’t seem to you like AI is everywhere yet, just wait – it’s getting to the point of consuming all that is still left of human privacy.
A group of researchers from the University of Washington planned to equip preschool teachers with wearable cameras and have them record everything they saw in class to develop AI models, 404 Media reports. The plan was scrapped after parents revolted, but the case is disturbing nevertheless.
According to the documents reviewed by reporters, the project, led by Dr. Gail Joseph, was supposed to study children’s everyday learning process and develop Al tools to “help assess classroom interaction quality.”
Parents weren’t asked if they agreed to participate in the program – they could opt out, but it was not clear how exactly their kids would be excluded from the footage, 404 Media writes. The document parents received was vague and did not explain who would get access to the data or disclose the project’s funding sources.
Any surveillance usually is opt-out, not opt-in – meaning, that whoever wants to watch you, in most cases, will set up the system first and notify you later (and maybe give you a chance to opt out). But the further we roll down this AI revolution road, the more pervasive surveillance becomes, engulfing spaces that previously were considered sacred.
The growth of the AI economy demands unlimited, unrestricted access to all human data in the world. That means we will see ourselves under more and more surveillance, in places we couldn’t imagine before, and it will be more and more challenging to exit the permanent surveillance mode.
But as long as you still have a chance to opt out, take advantage of it. Might not be for long.
OpenAI in your home
Speaking about omnipresent surveillance: OpenAI, the leading AI company in a constant search for income, is planning to enter the home devices market.
According to The Information, the firm, which has recently pocketed Apple’s former design chief, is working on a smart speaker. The device will also have a camera with facial recognition, so that it can “see” users and their surroundings.
According to a person who attended a staff presentation of the future device last summer, the gadget will be able “to observe users through video and nudge them toward actions it believes will help them achieve their goals.” For example, if you stay up late and have an important meeting in the morning, the speaker might suggest you go to bed.
What a Big Brother paradise, isn’t it? Humans may finally stop thinking for themselves for good, completely delegating their big and small life decisions to a smart machine.
The device is expected to be available next February or later and cost up to $300. Would you buy one?
Enter the anti-spy devices
Or – would you rather buy something that would prevent other people from recording you?
A startup named Deveillance, led by Aida Baradari, is taking aim at the ambient AI surveillance spreading around us via a whole slew of AI listening devices offering to record what happens during your day and give you summaries.
The firm is developing a device that would prevent such gadgets from quietly recording you. Baradari won’t tell how (understandably), but there are various ways to mess up a digital tape, The Atlantic writes.
For example, there is a technology that can add noise to the device’s microphone output by emitting a steady stream of ultrasonic sound, which the human ear can’t hear. However, the more advanced AI speech recognition becomes the better it filters out noises, recovers missed parts of speech and reconstructs context. So the latest versions of anti-intercept technologies include generating fake audio tracks that can be sent to the AI device instead of the genuine audio.
Read The Atlantic’s article for more on this kind of research if you’re curious.
A Flock update
Flock, a controversial license plate surveillance tool that has been used by ICE to track immigrants, by police to monitor protest rallies, and by some rogue law enforcement officers to stalk romantic partners, keeps making headlines.
Since 2025, a bunch of U.S. cities have decided to cancel their contracts with Flock over the fact that local traffic data may be shared with federal agencies with little transparency and oversight. But some local politicians are willing to fight for Flock tooth and nail.
For example, the mayor of Troy, a town in New York State, declared a state of emergency to keep the cameras on after the city council voted to pause payments to Flock. The vote was prompted by the outrage of local residents who found out about Flock cameras in their town, the Washington Post reported.
In the small Texas city of Bandera, the city council also voted to end its contract with Flock last week. A councilmember named Jeff Flowers, who supports Flock, did not take that well and said that if the city wants privacy so much it should abandon all modern technology, so he would propose a total ban on cell phones, GPS devices and internet services in the city, 404 Media reports.
In the meantime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is looking for a nationwide license plate data provider – Flock would be a likely candidate for such a contract, 404 Media writes. Another one is Motorola Solutions, which also has a massive license plate database – the company provides cameras for police vehicles.
At this point, Flock signs separate contracts with local police departments, and the cases of sharing that data with federal agencies have resulted in scandals and sometimes subsequent contract terminations. But technically, Flock’s cameras are installed across the country, and the database can be searched nationwide. So the de facto state of things might just become official soon.
The secret Canadian spyware
Meanwhile, across the northern U.S. border, Canadian lawyers are fighting to get the police to reveal the details of the spyware they’re using.
The Toronto Star wrote about a mysterious surveillance software Canadian police use to break into suspects’ phones and intercept communications. The police need to go to court and obtain a warrant before deploying the spyware, however, even in court, investigators refuse to explain what kind of tools they are using or who provides the spyware.
According to court documents, the “on‑device investigative tools” are sourced by the police’s Joint Technical Assistance Centre from an unknown private company. Police are so unwilling to reveal the spyware maker that when compelled by the court, they would rather drop an investigation altogether, which has happened in a number of cases, the Toronto Star writes.
The police defend the importance of the spyware for investigations and the secrecy around it, claiming that such tools “are used extremely rarely and in limited cases,” and that they are extremely costly to use.
The story is not shocking – police all around the world like tech surveillance tools and don’t like to talk about them. But Canada is known as one of the safest and most peaceful countries in the world, with respect for due process and human rights. Yet even the most civilized countries sometimes have secrets they don’t want anyone to know – an important thing to remember when thinking about surveillance.
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And that’s all from me for this week, folks.
Stay vigilant!
Anna