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Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly:

> Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?

> Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.

> Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.

> Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.

> Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.

> Lucius Fox: At what cost?

> Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.

> Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.

> Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.

> Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.

> The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.

A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation.

I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.

It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.

This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.

My read is that it's immoral because it's a surveillance hijack without the knowledge of the users, as opposed to an opt-in.

In the series Person of Interest, there's a scene where you can see racks of servers which allows to track everyone in a city (New York?).

When I first saw the scene I said: "This amount of servers is not remotely enough to pull something like this".

When I think of the scene now: "These amount of servers can do much more than the scene portrays".

I mean, most of the tech presented in the series is almost standard operations procedure via mundane equipment now.

Scary.

The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11.

Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.

These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.

I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.

The infrastructure is still there. It's the infrastructure that's the problem, the marketing is kind of whatever...

Ring has been a problem and it has only gotten worse now.

Isn't the whole point of the ad that they have a new feature and they want people to know about it? They're not making up the idea of finding lost dogs. They have a new feature where you upload a photo of your lost dog and it automatically looks for the dog in camera feeds.

Every technology has pros and cons. Are you insuating Flock is bad and evil (with your reference to 1984?)

I don't think Flock is this Big EviL coMpaNy you are making them out to be.

SFPD reported a 125% homicide clearance rate in 2025 (solving more cases than occurred that year), citing license plate readers (read: Flock) and drones as key factors in providing digital evidence.

The weratedogs guy has been posting political messages for as long as I can remember. This is completely in character for him.

It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.

That ad was great. I'm not sure how it sells Alexa products, but it was hilarious.

This nitpick in language adds nothing to the conversation and is fundamentally incorrect. "Fears of" does not imply the thing feared doesn't exist.

It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests.

You could purge the world of every single person with evil intentions, and things would maybe get better for a little while, but without fundamentally changing the underlying rules of the system the same thing would play out again with different actors.

You pay a third party to make something like this for you. They can best be described as nihilists.

Quoting from the press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/01/apple-introduces-new-...

"Designed exclusively for tracking objects, and not people or pets"

(emphasis mine)

Everyone's Ring doorbells and cameras.

"Helping abusive husbands find their escaped wives."

Know what is super hard to do? Leave your house without being caught by someone else's Ring camera.

Ring has experienced backlash before when they allowed police departments to browse the imagery without any kind of oversight or warrant. And has changed their policies as a result (in the most minimal way but ok)

And these are pretty high profile people whose job it is to represent the people who will also have concerns but don't all contact the verge about it :)

By the way i use ring cameras too but I've already mitigated them a lot. Installed telephoto lenses that can only see the specific area I want them to see, and I removed the microphones so they can't hear what I'm saying. I got some free with my ring alarm so I didn't really want to waste the hardware either.

Everyone I’ve talked to about the Super Bowl ads has mentioned that one and said that it is creepy af. The backlash is mostly word of mouth in my experience.

Exactly. There are certainly more than 9 of us who value privacy and understand where this is going, but in comparison to millions of normies we aren't even a screeching voice of minority[1].

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...

If you search for this story on other sites, the comments are full of backlash.

At what number of people do you consider it a backlash?

The subtext is that idiots are buying these things and should at least become aware that there are reasons for backlash that haven't occurred to them.

I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can go to?"

Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.

> joseffritz

As an Austrian I have to wonder, is this name a homage to Josef Fritzl, one of the most well known Austrians of modern time?

Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.

"I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature." And you base this guarantee on?

Bullshit to you sir. I have a ring and have cancelled my subscription because of their scummy behavior

I'm not sure you've thought this through. That would mean you can't record law enforcement or any other abuse of power.

The issue here isn't the recording, it's the packaging it up for sale that's the issue.

I think that goes too far, but limiting public space recordings to a camera you're operating in person would be a good starting point.

So google maps streetview should be illegal?