Apple's privacy invading tech is likely going mainstream

Progress waits for no one. And yet is it progress? Apple is rumored to be adding cameras to its highly purchased AirPods. It’s generally being sold to us as convenience tech - a solution to life’s little frictions - in this case, to aid Siri in answering random, stupid questions you might have without the friction of taking a photo on your phone, God forbid.

Convenience tech is not new, nor is Apple the only company servicing consumers with it. Companies spend a lot attempting to remove even the most minute amount of friction from the user’s experience in order to reduce churn and maximize revenue. The massive financial successes of Meta, Apple, and Google prove it’s a winning strategy. Each is forever pushing more ways to reduce “friction” and enlarge revenues. The very phones that have taken the world over are themselves privacy nightmares where users trade data and agency for small hits of dopamine and convenience. Now these companies are pushing AI and chatbots as the next big convenience - shoehorning them into every random website, app, and hardware imaginable. However, to make them less tedious, chatbots need context to work - bits of data that set the scene and augment the user’s every request. If left to the user to do manually, it might be slighly tedious. Hence, the next genius solution to reducing friction: leveraging cameras and other sensors to seemlessly capture photos and details of the very world you are in automatically attached to every request.

First it was microphones, then Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth, then GPS and a myriad of sensors added to every device imaginable. All capturing and reporting vast sorts of highly individual, incredibly detailed data of you and everything you did. However, the line seemed to always be cameras - society shunned Google Glass and SnapChat’s glasses and the like. But the world is very different now than it was even a few years ago. It has embraced data-harvesting superapps like ChatGPT and Copilot. And so it was inevitable that cameras would be embraced in the name of convenience.

Apple’s newest AirPods are rumored to have forward-facing cameras to assist Siri in helping you identify what you’re looking at. Pause for a moment to see how wild this is going to be. AirPods sell in the tens of millions across the globe. On the individual level, the cameras will follow people into their most intimate and private moments. Not only that, they’ll be recording everyone else’s most intimate and private moments without hesitation. So even though I abhor the thought of someone’s crappy AI tech capturing my every facial expression in high definition, I’ll have no say on the matter. What happens to that data after it’s sucked up into the cloud? I’m sure Apple will hand-wave any concerns about data privacy by washing them with sleek marketing and an encyclopedia’s worth of EULA and ToS policies.

Even if Apple somehow did actually care (it doesn’t) about preserving the data of the countless souls it’ll no doubt record and capture, its data will be compelled by law enforcement and governments across the globe. Its wearers will be contributing to incredibly valuable networks of data that can be stitched with an assortment of other secondary sources. It’s not hard to imagine the images and recordings being used to provide real-time physical data at protests, or used to aid investigations of unsavory types who disagree with their government. Just like when social media started to take over, the idea of users’ posts tied to their identity was shrugged off and is now being used to determine if visas are issued or if students are deported - once a privacy-invading technology is embraced by society, its negative effects are likely long-lasting and will further contribute to the erosion of privacy as we know it.