Everything's recording everybody. What now?

Meta just shipped a pair of smart glasses with no camera — a change that both David and The Verge's Victoria Song are excited about. But these glasses, like the new product from Amazon Bee and seemingly everything else now, are still ready and willing to record the world around you at all times. What do we do in a world where everything, everywhere, might be recording? And can tech companies figure out a way to make us feel better about it? You have until Thursday to vote for us in the Signal Awards! Vote Decoder: Best Business Podcast Vote Vergecast: Best Technology Podcast Vote Version History: Best History Podcast Further reading: Prep your cart before iPhone Duo preorders open tomorrow OpenAI agrees not to use trade secrets it allegedly took from Apple Your secrets aren’t safe with this cute robot toy — they’re on Chinese servers ready to be hacked I don’t miss the camera on the Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses Amazon’s always-listening Bee wearable can now help you buy stuff We can’t just change the definition of ‘recording’ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of automatic meeting recordings. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're going to talk about wearables, specifically these wearables that are just constantly recording you, recording your meetings, recording your conversations, in some cases, recording everything you do all of the time. There's a question about what recording means, what they're doing with these recordings, where they're storing these recordings, and how we as people feel, being the ones doing the recording or the ones on the other end. The Verge's V Song has been covering all of these devices, including a pair of Meta glasses that have no camera that I'm totally fascinated by. She's going to come on. We're going to try to figure out what to make of all of these new devices. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I'm Travis Larchek, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, October 15, 2026. Pre-orders for the highly anticipated folding iPhone Duo start tomorrow, but pre-pre-orders are already happening. Apple is letting customers pick out their phones, submit their payment information, basically everything up to actually pressing the buy button, which will go live tomorrow morning. And good luck beating all of the AI agents who will also be trying to buy the phone. Speaking of AI, OpenAI promised it won't use hardware secrets it allegedly got from some of its employees who used to work at Apple. This is the latest turn in a lawsuit Apple filed against OpenAI back in July. OpenAI made this agreement shortly after

• 1:27Speaker 01

  a US district judge signaled that he was highly likely to grant an injunction, forcing them to do it anyway. Meanwhile, OpenAI is accusing one of their former employees of sharing confidential files with Apple. Look at it this way. The way things are headed with always-listening wearable devices, soon, none of us will have secrets. Speaking of secrets, The Verge's Sean Hollister reported today on security vulnerabilities a researcher found with a cute little AI pet called Ellico. The toy is made by a company called Energize Labs, and apparently, it transcribed millions of conversations left completely unprotected. And it turns out, the company was literally profiling its customers based on those conversations.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  One customer was described as "having difficulty trusting family members." And after this, that customer's trust issues will only continue. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, October 15, 2026.

• 2:29Speaker 00

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• 4:33Speaker 00

  Okay, let's talk wearables. The Verge's V Song is here. Hi, V.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  All right, we need to do this at the beginning of every time you come on The Vergecast. I need a full rundown of all of the gadgets you're currently wearing.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  I have the Ray-Ban Meta Audio. I have Dexcom G7 CGM. I have the Apple Watch Series 12. I have the Fitbit Edge. And that's like four for today.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Kind of a light day for you, honestly.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah. I have my Oura Ring charging at the moment, so that's why I'm not wearing that. So, you know, afford a... Yeah, I'm sure the commenters will be like, "Oh, my God, she's fallen off." But it's... I honestly, three to five is normal for me these days, so.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  That's good. I'm glad to hear it. Well, another time, I want to talk about the Fitbit Edge because it runs right into a bunch of the stuff we've been talking about in a way that I think is fascinating. But for today, there's two devices and one theme that I want to talk about, which is a thing that you've been covering a lot. And I think the place to start here is with the glasses on your face, the Ray-Ban Meta Audio, which are, as I understand, just the Meta Ray-Bans minus the camera is essentially what Meta went to do here.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  I am fascinated by the sheer fact that these glasses exist at all, that Meta is even willing to make a pair of glasses like this as it goes harder and harder into smart glasses. It is pivoting a lot of its strategy around this as the hardware play. The fact that it is willing to make a pair of glasses without a camera at all strikes me as fascinating. What do you make of the fact that these even exist?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the timing is very funny, right? Because we've just had this summer of backlash against the Meta smart glasses.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Pervert glasses.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  You know, like however you want to call them, all their various, like whether it's Meta Ray-Ban or Ray-Ban Meta, all of the camera-equipped glasses, display and non-display, you know, a lot of people had big feelings about them over this last summer.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Have you noticed "pervert glasses" as a phrase going totally mainstream, by the way?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Like, at least among everyone I know, "pervert glasses" is now just a phrase people say.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the new glass hole. Like, we've retired glass hole, and we've gone to pervert glasses. And, you know, that was a big theme over the past summer. And so these glasses coming out sans camera, it feels like, haha, very convenient timing, right? Even though, when I went to Connect and I talked to Alex Hemel, who is their VP of Wearables, he was like, "These have been in the works for two years." Because that's the typical product timeline. They said that early on, the audio capabilities, they had underestimated how much people would like just the fact that these could be a pair of discreet, open-air headphones. They had underestimated that

• 7:31Speaker 02

  and the fact that when you omit the camera, you open it up to a lot of different styles that can be a little less chunky, so to speak. These are particularly, you know, it doesn't have my prescription in it. Otherwise, it would be chunky no matter what with my prescription.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  These have like a wireframe on the bottom. None of the smart glasses thus far from Meta have the ability to have a wireframe in any capacity just because of how much tech needs to go into the frame itself. If you look at the temple, they're a lot thinner than the typical Meta glasses are.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would actually put them closer, like on the spectrum between a normal pair of glasses and the normal Meta Ray-Bans, I would put these closer to regular glasses.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Like, they're a huge leap forward in looking good on your face.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that's kind of their whole, like, push with this particular pair of glasses is that, you know, at Connect, they had said that Muse, our cute little dystopian friend Muse, is coming to all of the glasses. And that would include these ostensibly. Right now, it's not on there, but the idea is that, okay, you have people who are now, very conveniently, even though that wasn't their intent, creeped out by a camera.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  But you can still have a very powerful AI agent embedded into it. It's more fashionable-looking. It's more discreet. So, you know, you get people to interact with Muse maybe a bit more. If you stuff it in a pair of glasses like these without the camera, it's a little bit nerfed as to what you can do with AI.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Some people will be appreciative of that. Some... There are definitely people who would be like, "Well, why omit the camera at all? This is now a useless pair of glasses."

• 9:33Speaker 02

  You know, there's points.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  I categorically do not agree with the people who say it's nerfed by not having a camera. Like, A, we're at a point right now with so many of these AI tools where the visual intelligence stuff they do is not that good. And B, you have a phone. Like, the "I need you to take a picture of something" problem is solved. We have the technology for taking a picture of something. And actually, that's a much better way to solve this problem, if you ask me, because I can point my phone at something and take a picture, and I can tell you what matters by pointing my camera at it. Whereas saying, "We're going to have this camera on that's looking at everything all the time, and we're going to figure out what's important," it doesn't work. Like, it doesn't work. And so to me, the idea of like, having no camera,

• 10:18Speaker 00

  and then when I need to take a picture, I can, I would argue is actually a better user experience for most people. Not being able to take hands-free pictures is something. And there are people who like doing that, and I think that's great. But as an AI tool, I'm not bothered at all by losing the camera here. Not at all.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. That... I also share in that experience, like, the title of my review is that I did not miss the camera at all with these glasses.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  I will say that, like,

• 10:45Speaker 02

  for an accessibility use case, the people who really lose out there are, you know, the blind and low-vision community, people who don't have use of their hands or have limb differences, those people. Yeah, losing the camera, this isn't a viable option for them.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  And that is a very... Big conversation, a totally different can of worms. This is not necessarily for those people and they have other options. The other kind of feature that was introduced at MetaConnect, which is also still not available just yet, is FDA cleared hearing assistance. So when you think about these in that perspective, if you're someone with mild to moderate hearing loss, you pay upfront for, I think it's an additional $150 fee. It comes to the glasses through software. And then these are kind of a discreet pair of hearing assistance. Hearing, over the counter, hearing aid type situation,

• 11:49Speaker 02

  which, you know, a lot of people I talk to in this industry are very aware of the stigma that comes with hearing aids and even something like a pair of AirPods that have that same functionality. A pair of glasses, if you're wearing them, it reduces the stigma quite a bit for that kind of use case. And so that's why there's a lot of interest in this type of open year headphone solution for that particular accessibility use case. None of this like solves the, the major problem that a lot of people have with smart glasses. Like, I think the whole removing the camera, like walking out and about in these glasses. I was like, oh, I feel a lot more relaxed. I'm not worried.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Did you actually? I was wondering about this because I know you've struggled with how you feel testing these things out in public around other people. And if you feel like you're obligated to tell everyone everything you have that's recording every time you sit down at a table. Like, did you notice the difference having these glasses versus the other ones?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, because like, there's no, it's, it's a little hard to accidentally start recording with the camera glasses, but I've done it. It can be done.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  It happens sometimes. And you don't always know that's happening. I've had it happen. I've, I've been in conversation with other people who've had that happen and watch it and then you have to be like, oh, are you recording me right now? This is an awkward conversation. You know, there's no worrying on my part about having to disclose that because I actually disabled the wake word. So if I say the wake word for these, it's, it's not going to do anything. There's an action button here. So one, I hate saying the wake word out in public. I feel very lame doing that. So actually just programming this action button to summon the AI for me.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  There's no ambient listening going on until I, I trigger it. And then it's either going to be the AI only listening to me for my query. Or if I'm activating some sort of translation feature, the way that this translation feature works now, I would have to basically inform the person, hello, I, these are translating for me. You're disclosing that. It's not necessarily one of those always listening, I'm recording every conversation you have type of feature. Although understandably, I think a lot of people in the public would still views the, view this as a sort of surveillance tech because they think, oh, it's always ambiently listening. You can disable that.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  I disabled that. Other people wouldn't know per se, but I know, I, I know. And I feel better about that. And, um, you know, my hair kind of covers the, the temples. I know I'm not being a creep. And so my worry about getting punched goes infinitely down. Like, it, it is kind of weird because I go out now and I'm like, I'm not going to be a jerk. I don't record people out in public. And if I do, I disclose it. But I feel like a paranoid person because I'll go out testing these glasses and I'll think to myself, okay, well, when I'm in public, what I'm going to do in a testing scenario is I'm going to take the toggle that's inside and turn it off. And if someone asks me that these are this, I will take it off

• 15:12Speaker 02

  and I'll show it to them and then I'll ask them their feelings about that. And then I'll use that for my future reporting and it's going to be okay. Which is, is a psychological burden to have when you have this type of device. Yeah, I don't have that with these. I feel great. Like, I don't feel like, like in, in the comment section, some of our readers were just like, you're still a pervert. You're still a creep wearing these. And I would gently say, no, I'm not. Because again, I have disabled the wake word. It's not ambiently listening to anybody. And I can't record any footage of you. There's no transcripts being generated. I feel great. I can just listen to my podcasts and my music when I'm out on my daily walks. And that's generally the basic function of this

• 15:55Speaker 02

  because the AI model that is on here, Muse Spark, it a little dumb.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  It is less dumb than before, but still kind of dumb.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  It is very funny to me that we're, we're going to back our way into what I think was a good idea the first time. Like this idea of audio glasses, which let you take calls and listen to music on your glasses is not new. And it's not an AI idea, but it didn't work before. And, and it didn't really get any kind of marketing muscle or excitement behind it. But like the Bose Frames, I mean, this is a long time ago now that those were out.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  It was like seven years.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's very funny that we're going to, we're going to sort of overshoot with what these glasses could be. And then the whole industry is going to sort of slowly back its way up back to that seven year old idea, which I think was a good idea the whole time. It's going to be really interesting to see all of that. It's like hybrid cars, right? Like everybody, we way overshot and then everybody's going to come back and be like, oh, actually the middle ground here is kind of nice. Let's linger there for a little while.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's like a really good analogy because I loved the Bose Frames when they first came out. I was like his moto at the time, but my headline there was like, I was so ready to dunk on these, but actually I kind of love them.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Rock.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  And it was surprising how much I love them because I'm someone who goes out and I walk a lot. And if you are someone who walks a lot, you want, like, I use this example every single time I come on here. North Jersey drivers, maniacs, maniacs, all of them. And I, I really need that situational awareness while I'm out and about. I wouldn't say these are great if you're just like in the office, listening to your tunes, the sound leakage, the sound leakage is real. If you're on the subway.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Sorry, you still need your AirPods. It's not going to work on a subway. But if you're just out and about walking, trying to get your steps in, like many of us are, and you just kind of want to listen to stuff while you're on the go, but still engage with your surroundings. If you're at home, I, I love being at home and using these while I'm listening to an audiobook or a podcast because I can still hear my spouse when they want my attention. If my cat is like yowling at the moon because he's hungry, I'll know. And he won't like knock shit over from the table. It's great. It, it, it is like it, I have this problem at home where my spouse and I are always listening to stuff. So we have our AirPods in and then we'll be screaming for each other because we're in a very vertical house.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  And we're like, hey, can you hear me? Can you hear me? And we'll be running up and down floors. I don't have that problem if they want my attention and I have this on. It's, it's actually quite great.

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• 21:09Speaker 00

  You've poked at the big thing I want to talk about here, but I do very briefly want to talk about one more gadget, which is something from Amazon B that is a name I never thought I would hear again. But I actually don't know what this is. So I just want you to tell me live what Amazon B AI thing is coming out, because I assume it fits into this narrative a little bit, too.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yes, so Amazon just announced the Amazon B Frontier, which last year B was its own company and then Amazon acquired it. And it's basically one of those always listening, always recording. You could call it a surveillance wearable. Sure, let's go with that. But it's sort of like Plod Note, all of these note taking apps. And it'll give you to do summaries of your day, very similar to kind of what Apple has proposed for the Apple Watch Series 12 on Ultra 4 with audio intelligence. A bit different because you do get these transcripts of your day that you can kind of assign speakers to.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  You have to train it on your voice, but it can do that. Costs $74.99. And it's sort of what I tested last year. So if you read the review that's up on the site, you get a gist of the features. There are some changes, like supposedly it's better at distinguishing your voice versus broadcast voice now. So hopefully less fan fiction gets written. Last year it was just like, hey, hey, V, be sure to take into account the septa strikes for your students.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Right, I thought you were having conversations with the news on TV, basically.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Or Severance. I was watching Severance at the time. And like my to do's were just like, make sure that your inny and your outy are on the same page and stuff like that. So they say that that's basically been fixed a bit, but it is yikes. And they also have a kind of a version that doesn't look so much like a Fitbit because the B Frontier looks like a Fitbit. They have something called the B Eclipse, which is a MagSafe thing that you stick on the back of your phone.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  And that's another thing that's everywhere all of a sudden.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. The difference here is that this is going to have a desktop app and there's going to be a Pro subscription, which has integrations. And what are those integrations? Aha, this is why Amazon wanted to buy B, because based on the conversations and the notes that it takes during the day, it'll be like, oh, you talked to someone about toilet paper. Here's a handy dandy little Amazon thing so that you can do Amazon shopping. And now bada bing bada boom, you can buy through Amazon the toilet paper that you mentioned in a conversation.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  V, I spend so much of my time telling people that their phone isn't listening to them. And you're telling me Amazon is shipping a gadget that makes your phone listen to you and sell you ads.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  It's a thing that's on your wrist that connects to your phone.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Or importantly, is on somebody else's wrist. So, okay, so this is the big thing that I want to get into here, which is basically this question of what is being recorded in the world? And should that be allowed? Who's doing it? And look, we could talk about this forever, but I want to talk about one particular slice of it that I know you've been thinking a lot about, which is, I think if you, even if you're a person who thinks it is horrible and wrong for you to be taking video of me all day, every day. And I think a lot of people fall into that category. These tech companies are trying to find a middle ground, right? Where they say, we're going to, in some other way, capture lots of information. Or we're going to record things, but we're not going to store those things. We want to be able to give you this kind of information

• 24:48Speaker 00

  without this permanent record or transcript of everything that's going on. And will that make you feel less creeped out by these devices that are constantly paying attention to you? You wrote a story for the site a couple of weeks ago, arguing that maybe that is not a distinction we can make, whether technically or as humans in the world. But I'm curious how you're thinking about it right now, particularly in light of devices like these where Meta is saying, you can turn the thing off. We won't, we're not going to be listening or watching. Even if we are, we're not going to do anything with the video. It's just for other stuff. Everybody is trying to find this middle ground. Do you think it exists?

• 25:27Speaker 02

  I think they're asking the wrong question, to be quite frank. Like, you know, they're kind of taking this clever route of litigating the definition of a recording. And so Apple is doing it. I asked B, the B people yesterday at Amazon, like, you know,

• 25:50Speaker 02

  how are you handling this recording definition thing? And they're like, we don't record the audio file. You just have the transcript. And so it's like, okay.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Well, so wait. So by definition, you are recording the audio file. You're just then transcribing it and throwing it away. Like, if you're not recording audio, you can't get a transcript. That's technology.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  And there you have it, right? Like, Apple is doing the same thing, basically. They're saying like, we have this private compute. The raw audio file is recorded and then it's processed. But once it's processed, it's deleted. So therefore, there's no recording that's been stored. And all you have is a transcript of dubious levels of attribution. So Apple is taking the route of saying that nothing is attributed. And, you know, that feels like an oblique nod to dual consent recording laws. Various states like California, both parties have to consent to being recorded. New York, New Jersey, only one party has to consent to being recorded.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  And the whole thing is that, can it be subpoenaed, right? So from a legal definition, can you use it in a case if it doesn't say who said what and is just a high level summary? You know, a lot of these companies are arguing like, no, that's not a recording. That is just a summary and a summary is not a recording. But on the opposite side of that, you can just be like, you're trusting the AI to be super intelligent in discerning what's sensitive information and what's not sensitive information and how to attribute that or not. And I'm guessing any shrewd lawyer would still try to subpoena that anyway, regardless of whether it's admissible or not.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  I mean, but also forget the lawyers. Like, I think, to your point about the Apple stuff, I think the response to the audio intelligence stuff on the Apple Watch was really interesting to me because Apple's deeply technical explanation about all the data it's not storing didn't make anybody feel any better. The idea that I can sit here and replay the last 15 seconds of our conversation freaked people out, in like a really visceral way freaked people out.

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• 29:34Speaker 00

  To me, the thing I keep thinking about is the difference between listening and recording. And I think people are spooked by things that are listening, irrespective of whether they're recording. Just the idea that you are listening to me. Is a problem, right? And, and, and forget video recording. Like, that's a whole other can of worms that I think my, my running theory is that eventually, in some meaningful way, the market is just going to reject the camera first stuff. Like, I don't think we're coming back from pervert glasses. And I just don't think the industry has realized it yet. But the audio stuff, everybody wants there to be a way through this that threads the needle that kind of works.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  And I just think we're still at a point now where people cannot get past, well, what do you mean it's listening all the time? Forget the output of that listening, the existence of that listening freaks people out.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it gets to this whole, actually, kind of Severance-like, a thing where it's like, yes, your phone can record externally, but everything on your phone and how you use it, like, I hold up my phone and you immediately know what I'm doing.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Put it in a wearable form factor, and not only does it become more discreet, you just don't necessarily know what I'm doing. That's not reached peak consciousness in, in the public yet. Yes, in our, in our little space of nerd, the nerd universe, we kind of know what we're talking about. But you talk to someone's grandpa, they have no idea what, or like, generally, the grandpa doesn't have any idea that the glasses can do these things.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  But that's why I think the watch was such an interesting one. Like, the, the watch is a totally mainstream device. And, and everybody has it. And it's like, you're telling me that by default, it's now going to be listening to me?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  It's not by default. It's, it's actually something you have to opt into.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  But not each time. Like, like, this is, it's not a, it's a thing you, it's not a thing you have to sit down and be like, I am now doing it. Welcome to our meeting.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Not for a Siri recap, but the live rewind, it will pop up a chime and there'll be like a little mic that records when you do it. But it's not uniform, right? It's not uniform. There's a problem of educating the mass public about what, how these works, which I've struggled with because, like, I have to sit there and I have to learn all the nitty gritty ins and outs. But like, regardless of that, the, the thing that it really boils down to me is that all of these devices used to just be about you and your data. You can do whatever you want with your data. And I think as a society, we know that we should be a little more circumspect and a little more cautious about what we do with our data. But there is this idea that it's my data, I can do whatever I want with it.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  What this new class of devices asking is for you to be a steward of not only your data, but everyone else's data. So suddenly, I'm not putting only my data at risk. I am putting your data at risk. I am basically an unintentional spy out in the world. And nobody necessarily knows. And we don't have this cultural language to basically convey that I am not a creep. Like, because the, the creature out there, and like, the, the metaphor that I use a lot is, and I'm, I'm stealing it from a different conversation, but like, let's say you have a bowl of M&Ms.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  And 10% of those M&Ms are poison. And they're mixed in with the M&Ms that are not poison. You have people wearing glasses, and let's say every single one of them can record in some capacity, either audio or camera. 10% of the people are going to be creeps about it. You don't know, just by looking at someone walking down the street, which one are creeps and which ones are not. And this is a problem that the accessibility community is dealing with right now. Because if you look at someone and they are visibly blind, or they are visibly handicapped in some way, you are probably going to go, oh, they have a camera in their glasses, they're probably not a creep, they are probably using them for accessibility reasons.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  However, accessibility is a spectrum. And not everyone, there is such a thing as invisible disabilities. You know, unfortunately, there are cases where people are like, hey, you don't look like you need accessibility features, so you must be a pervert. And this is why I, you know, online, I'm just like, please don't punch people who are wearing these glasses. I know why everyone is saying that. I know we're trying to express our discomfort with this new type of wearable surveillance. But please just don't punch people, because you just don't know why they have them. And the vast majority of people are not the creeps out there. They're using it primarily for their own private use.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  But because 10% of the M&Ms are poisoned in this scenario, you just don't know. And I'm very empathetic to that. And I think these are super valid concerns. But, you know, to get back to the original point, I don't think the tech companies are asking the right question here, which is, they're going like, we've made it through some technical thing to be private. Well, you've made it private for the owner. You haven't addressed at all the societal concerns. You haven't addressed at all, like, what the etiquette should be. Because if you think about these always listening AI note takers, they make a lot of sense in a business, in a business perspective. I think as journalists, we already disclose stuff that's recording on the record, off

• 35:09Speaker 02

  the record, we tell our sources, all of these things. For us to have these tools in those scenarios, I think the vast majority of journalists would find that extremely useful. And I think that would apply to students and classes, lecturers, business meetings, all of those scenarios. You can talk about Zoom recordings and Gemini recordings for Google meets. A lot of us have basically gone, yeah, that's super convenient. It makes sense to have a transcript, because in that societal instance, we all understand that the recording is for this purpose, and it's going to be used for notes, and it's not going to be distributed and used in a nefarious way. But they're doing it 24/7.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  So, but are we, do you feel like we're just barreling towards a world where you have to assume that's happening? Whether either your own devices are recording you or someone else's, right? Like, 10% is, is a good example, right? If you're, if you're in a restaurant, should you assume that 1 in 10 people has one of these life logging devices and thus is capturing you in some way? Like, I had, I had a moment the, the other day where I was walking my kids up the sidewalk to daycare. And somebody comes running out of his house, and he's like, hey, I have a question for you. And it turns out, he had a video of me on his Ring doorbell from three days earlier, right before his car got hit. And so he was like, is this you? And he showed me a video of myself from three days earlier, walking my kids to daycare.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  And this was such a, like, innocuous thing, perfectly nice guy just asking if I, like, saw what happened to his car. I have not been able to stop thinking about it, because I was like, oh, this person is recording me. Every single day when I take my kids to daycare, this person is recording me. And it's just, it is the sort of thing that when that veil gets lifted, even in some small way, it gets very hard to stop noticing. And I do wonder if we are just running towards that with these life logging wearables in the same way.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  We are. I actually, just the other day, had the same experience that you did, kind of, like, where I was just walking through my neighborhood, and I took a different route, and a house said, you are now being recorded from a Ring camera, just announced it. And I was like, oh, I hate that, because I was just in-

• 37:20Speaker 00

  At least it announces it, that's something.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Not every house does, but like, that particular house, I was like, is it a good thing that it announced it and made me aware? Because it changed my behavior. And that's what all of these things are going to do. And that's what I think people are really kind of rebelling against. It just changes your behavior, your guard goes up. You don't feel like you can just be yourself and like, just, ah, relax. So I think that is what people are viscerally reacting to. And it's something that the tech companies are like, oh, huh, but why is that a problem? And it's like, you guys need to talk to the average person a bit more to find out why that's a problem.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  But it's, it's, it's one of those things where, let's peel back the layers a little bit. And what do they want? They want data, because the data makes the AI more useful. For your AI assistant to be the best possible personal assistant ever, it has to know everything about you. But not only everything about you, everything about the people in your lives that you interact with regularly. So that's the thing that we're grappling with. And I think that's something that society needs to weigh in on, because otherwise, the tech companies will make the decision for us. And I don't think that they should have unilateral ability to make that decision alone. That is something that the average person has to, has to weigh in on.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  And we have to collectively have this discussion publicly and talk about how we want to use this tech. Because I'm just sitting here screaming internally every single day now, going like, I started this job tracking steps, and now I'm an inadvertent private spy, just walking about, not wanting to. Did I consent to this? Kind of, not really, at the same time. I have existential crises every day.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  All I will say is, you should have all of these existential crises out loud, so that Vee can hear you. And maybe you can just slowly start to infect the system that way.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  They're, they're sending me one, so we'll see. I'm curious to see how it's changed from last year, because last year, it was very much like, this thing has written fanfiction about my life. And the ways that it was actually truthful was kind of uncomfortable for me personally. We'll see.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Love that it'll just be like, oh, Vee talked about nail glue, here's an Amazon pop-up for nail glue.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Vee, yeah, you'll have to report back. I'm very curious on the weird stuff it tries to sell you, but, so keep me posted.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Signing off from the wearable surveillance state.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, go, go put on some more gadgets, it's gonna be great. We'll see you later. Thanks, Vee.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  All right, that's it for the show. Thank you again to Vee for being here, and thank you, as always, for listening. This is a category, as you just heard, I want to hear lots of opinions about. I think this is a kind of device that all of these companies want to put on our faces and on our wrists and all over our bodies, for a variety of reasons. And there are real, honest to God, good use cases for them, but they all come with this big, messy set of trade-offs. And I really want to know how all of you feel about it. So send us an email, [email protected], call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. Weigh in on all of this and everything else. And like Vee said, please don't punch each other in the face. And as always, the best thing you can do to support all of what we're up to here at The Verge is to subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com/subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters, it gets you all of our coverage of everything, all of the time. Theverge.com/subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode is produced by Josh Kahas, Kabir Chopra, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk. See you tomorrow. Rock and roll.

• 41:13Speaker 05

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