How Much Surveillance Are We Comfortable With?

Kusha Navadar (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show, I'm Kusha Navadar filling in for Brian today here on WNYC.

Hey, how much surveillance are we comfortable with? That's the question my next guest tackles. I imagine a lot of you right now are listening and you're thinking, well, I don't want any surveillance. You don't want flock cameras on the street, or people recording you with meta glasses. And yet, many of us will like and reshare a video on TikTok of someone recording a stranger. I mean, do you recall the two canoodling lawyers in July that's making news right now? Two co-workers, reportedly a married man and a younger colleague were making out in Central Park. A TikToker recorded them, uploaded the video, and now the world knows. And the older lawyer, as of yesterday, reported by The New York Post, has left the firm.

This is all to say the concept of a surveillance state isn't just the government or tech companies.

It's us. It's each other. And there's a lot of questions about how our culture has shifted there and where it's going. Willy Staley is a story editor for The New York Times Magazine. He recently wrote an article titled, Flock Cameras, Canoodling Lawyers. How much surveillance are we comfortable with? And he's with me right now in the studio. Hi, Willy. Absolutely. And listeners, we want to know how much surveillance are you comfortable with? Have you seen the public's appetite for a surveillance state change over the decades? Do you feel a lack of privacy in your own life and has it changed how you interact in the world? Maybe you kiss fewer coworkers on park benches. I don't know. Give us a call. Send us a text. We're at 212-433-9692.

That's 212-433-WNYC.

Or if there's anyone out there who wants to talk about how a greater culture of surveillance has benefited their lives, we'd love to hear from you too. Give us a call or send us a text. Okay, so Willy, there are so many sources of surveillance in our lives. There are flock cameras. There's body cams. The most ubiquitous being the devices we hold in our hands, phones. But I also remember candid camera from decades ago. There's always in my mind like a desire to peek in from others. So what makes this moment feels so much different in terms of culture of surveillance in the past?

Willy Staley (2:31)

Well, I mean, a couple of things kind of converge this summer in my mind. I mean, you had the release of the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, obviously, that like we do whatever. We tried Google Glass like a decade ago and that didn't really take off. But this does seem that it's selling, it's doing well. So there's this, there's this, whatever people call them pervert glasses and for good reason.

But there are these new products that make it easier for us to surreptitiously record one another. And at the same time, people became aware of flock safety cameras all over their communities. And these are, there's like more than 100,000 of them, pretty much all across the United States. And like a pretty large social media led movement to make people aware of these and to sort of protest against them and even to vandalize them, to identify them sort of in a crowdsourced way, took off largely via TikTok in my understanding. And these two things are obviously in sort of tension. And so I think that, I think it's these technologies sort of arising together is why we wanted to do this piece, why I wanted to do this piece and yeah, talk about the inconsistency there.

Kusha Navadar (3:45)

So what I hear you saying is that the moment is different because the tech is different.

Willy Staley (3:50)

Yeah, the tech has advanced a lot.

Kusha Navadar (3:51)

Advanced and ubiquitous.

Willy Staley (3:53)

Yes.

Kusha Navadar (3:54)

Yeah. I used to work at Google and I was the first cohort of people that tested Google Glass out in the wild and I thought I was so cool.

Willy Staley (4:04)

How did it go for you?

Kusha Navadar (4:05)

Not well. I had somebody come up to me and say, please don't record me. Interestingly, it was a coworker at Google that did it out in public. No, but I wouldn't make the same decision today and I wasn't recording for the record, but yeah.

Willy Staley (4:20)

But there were physical gestures with Google Glass that took to begin recording, which was meant to be a safeguard against totally surreptitious recording.

Kusha Navadar (4:28)

Yeah, absolutely.

Willy Staley (4:29)

With Meta-Rabeon, I think you have to talk to it and there's an indicator light, but the indicator light can be disabled supposedly. Anyway, anything with hardware can be fiddled with.