Is your doorbell using AI to spy on you?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. It's 2009 and we're in the German mountains. A man straps himself into a car on the world's most dangerous racetrack. He whispers to himself. It's time to put my balls on the dashboard. As he starts the engine. In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance on conscious. In 15 years, he's a billionaire. This is Total Wolf, Formula One's most powerful team boss and the breakout star of Drive to Survive. This week on GoodBab billionaire, How Total Wolf made his billions. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This literally is the beef of the century because this is the beef that is still fueling so many decisions in the AI race today. From the BBC, this is the interface. The show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Thomas Dremain, tech columnist at the BBC who covers how we use technology and how technology uses us. I'm Karen Howe, investigative reporter covering all things AI. I'm Nicky Wolf and I do the weird internet subculture and national security stuff. Today on the interface, we will be discussing. Is your doorbell spying on you and your neighbors? Why the US TikTok take over matters even if you don't use the app? And the beef that launched ChatGBT. So who put the Super Bowl on Sunday? I can't. Not I. The only Brit in this recording is the only one who watched the Super Bowl. I guess for the football. Yeah. I had a friend come over for dinner and I was like, "Oh, we should watch something." Like, what do you want to put on? He's like, "Oh, the Super Bowl is right. I'd completely forgotten it." Which makes me feel like I'm not a real American. No, really American. Are you guys like big fans of the ads? I was this time. Yeah. There's one ad in particular that we want to talk about now, right? Yeah. And it got people very wild up because of what it implied. And that ad was by Ring the Doorbell company. Loads and loads of people I know use it. I'm sure that's the same for you guys. It's very useful. You know, someone rings the doorbell. You have an app on your phone. You can see who stood outside. What they announced during the Super Bowl ad was a new feature that they've been soft rolling out for a little while called Search Party. They announced it for Lost Dogs. They were like, "We have already saved 99 missing dogs because someone, someone whose dog runs away, you can hit the app. And it will turn on everyone's Ring Door cameras and look around for the Lost Dog." I like finding Lost Dogs. I mean, that sounds nice. But it also means that your camera is part of this giant surveillance network. A lot of people totally freaked out about this, right? Yeah. And I think. Barely rightly so. I mean, we live in an era where surveillance, mass surveillance, and law enforcement overreach, if we can very diplomatically put it like that, is top of the news. I saw this ad too and I feel like the thing that was. There were two things that made this ad, I think, really bad for the company. The first one is that they talked about how this Search Party feature has successfully found 99 dogs in 90 days of operation. There are 10 million lost dogs in the world. So it's not even a good functioning product. People have been talking about. That's pretty good. It's literally a 0.005% success rate. Like the 99 dogs. That's more than no dogs. You got to. I like that. That's true. But the problem number two is that. I think the visuals of the ad. I think that's why it's set off alarm bills for everyone. Because they literally showed all of the homes suddenly lighting up and scanning the streets with blue light to find the dog. And in a moment right now where so much of the US has ice on the top of their minds and all the things that have been happening with confrontations between ice and citizens. Immigration and customs enforcement. Yeah, this is why the ad has gone instantly viral in the wrong direction for the company. Like so many hundreds of thousands, millions of people now are talking about how. They never knew that this was a possibility. They had no idea and they want to immediately opt out of the feature or ditch the product. And what a lot of people describe it as a Trojan horse. Who could object to the last dogs? But the functionality of this, the potential for this to be used for other things. Even if we say the US government, will we absolutely above board with this? And we already know that the US government has successfully requested and received Ringcamer footage. You know, you're trusting every government and a massive tech company here. And that is a huge leap of faith that I don't think tech companies have really earned. And Ring in particular, these aren't hypothetical concerns. Sharing Ringcamer footage with law enforcement for a long time was the point. Ring partnered with police departments all over the United States, passed out these cameras, encouraged them to distribute them in neighborhoods, specifically as a tool to set up police surveillance. In fact, they had this system set up where police could create bringing accounts and they could get access to camera footage from people's houses without a warrant. They could just request it from the company and they would hand it right over. This caused a big controversy. There were cases where people were like they didn't realize that they were handing over like their home security footage to police departments and they shut that feature off. But there's all kinds of other concerns right there was this big federal trade commission. But I think a lot of people who pay really close attention to Ring saw the sad and were like, yeah, duh, what did you think this was? There's this giant tech company that has all of these cameras all over the United States and all over the world and yeah, they are in control of that footage. It's stored on their servers. And like you were saying, this search party feature that for now is just about finding less dogs is on automatically if you don't want to participate, you have to go. This is a huge point. They've opted you in. It's worth saying as well. The reason why I think people were so freaked out is because of the ice stuff that's happening right now. And just as you were saying, Tom, that Ring has a history of giving data to law enforcement. Ice also has a history of trying to use different types of technology platforms like this one to engage in more surveillance. Like there was this scene that for a for media published that actually documented a bunch of the different tech apps and tech platforms that ice has used, including ones that they have partnerships with, like with Palantir where Palantir is developing this immigration OS platform that's integrating all this data into from different government agencies to track immigrants. But also from tech companies that they don't actually have official partnerships with. So the four of four Zeen talks about flock, which is this network of cameras that do automated license recognition in the US. And what four or four found was that ice will ask local police departments that have access to flock to do searches at the behest of ice. So think about like flock is 80,000 cameras and it's specifically license plate recognition. Ring is millions and millions and millions more cameras. Like this is the largest private camera network in the world and that just completely expands to a different scale. The level of visibility that a law enforcement agency like ice could have if they wanted it. Palantir of course is a tech company founded by the billionaire Peter Teal that does a lot of data processing for the US government and the military. And now ice, similar issues and customs enforcement and the UK government just signed a huge just a few months ago signed a huge deal with Palantir. So they're also working in security here. I mean Palantir is literally named for the scrying device that sour on users in the Lord of the Rings. I mean it could not be more. These tech companies are not subtle. But if you name yourself after literally the ultimate evil and one of the largest stories I think I mean help us help you guys Silicon Valley. Now ring in their defense says they have like really robust security practices. We also aren't here to say like ring is evil. This is bad. No one should use it. It's it's a personal choice. So we did get in touch with ring and they got back to us with a response. But it says that right now this particular feature search party can only recognize dogs. They said they do have an optional feature called familiar faces that does use human facial recognition. They said that video sharing is never automatic and you can with search party share by choice to share the video with the dog owner. They also said that ring has no partnership with ice. But they did say that they do hand over data to law enforcement. But only when they're legally required to do so. Yeah, I mean those are pretty robust. protections, right? But I think what a lot of critics are concerned about, and also like what a lot of people who saw this ad are worried about, is like it shows you like the potential of this technology and the kinds of things. It could be used for if the company, you know, changes its policies or changes its strategies and point in the future. The in-fans is that these are very useful. My dad who's disabled has a, I don't think it's ring, but another similar camera installed in his flat so that his carer can always check in and make sure he hasn't had a fall, make sure that he's safe. Loads of people feel like this makes them safer. But you know, there's a trade-off that people are making. Like you're saying, Nikki, there's a very real way in which these can help promote the safety of your house and your family. That's that's an absolutely realistic possibility and outcome of using these products. But there is a trade-off which is giving up control over, you know, what is happening on your own property. Sometimes inside your own house and it opens you up to potential consequences in the future. I mean, you can think about people talk about your data, you know, maybe no one's doing anything bad with it right now. But the fact that it exists means that someday in the future, it can be used for a purpose that you don't like or you're not comfortable with. Yeah. And it is possible to say I can see the argument that this is worth it for the chance of saving a life. Even for the chance of finding your dog, right? But that's the question that we're being asked and because it's opt out rather than opt in, that's not even a question we're being asked. And in terms of questions being answered for you, let's say you're not comfortable with having a ring camera. If your neighbor across the street puts one on the door and it points towards your house and you're filming, there's nothing you could do about that. So it's like other people are deciding. And I think this speaks to one of the key questions that surrounds all of tech, which is how much privacy are you willing to sacrifice for convenience? Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things is like these companies kind of use the convenience to a road privacy, but they don't actually have to do that, right? Like they could provide these features without also accessing the footage. So they kind of use the convenience doorway into being able to monetize off of really intimate data and intimate moments in people's eyes. If you want to turn this off, it's very easy to do. If you have a ring camera, you open up the ring camera app, you go to the homepage. There's like a little menu up at the top that you can click on. And then you go to the control center and there should be a feature there called search party or it'll say something like opt into or opt out of helping to find lost pets, which I mean, why would you want to do that? We all we love lost pets. So this is easy to turn off if you're not comfortable with it. There are a whole bunch of other privacy settings that you can go switch off as well, which is something that I really think everyone should go look at. Like even if you're totally comfortable with ring, if you've got one of these things on the front of your house or inside your house, just go look at what privacy settings they offer you with and make sure you're comfortable with it. 100%. Yeah, we're fixated on ring here, but just think for a second about all of the products in your house that are connected to the internet, all of them are collecting information. I know at Karen's house, it's like you're a lot I'd so it's just like a bunch of rocks and stones like nothing. I do like I don't even know if you have Wi-Fi, but for the rest of us, there's even I worry about the stuff and it's worth just putting in any effort that you can, you know, after you're done listening to the show, just check it out, see what's out there. It's worth your time. I love that. I like surprisingly do not have a digital hygiene routine. So I feel like after this episode, I'm immediately going to look at my two technology objects in my house. Right. You're like 2005 Nokia Brick cell phone. Yeah, and your your abacus, you know, it's 2009 and we're in the German mountains. Amanda straps himself into a car on the world's most dangerous racetrack. In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance on conscious in 15 years. He's a billionaire. This week on Good Bad Billionaire, How Total Wolf made his billions. So we've been talking about the power that all these technology companies have over our lives. And I think there's one in particular right now that perhaps like culturally in the conversations we're all having that has more of an influence than any other. And that is TikTok. And it's a good moment to be talking about it because there was this huge transition. There's a TikTok takeover right where the company that owns TikTok, a Chinese company called Bite Dance was forced to sell the US operations of the app to a consortium of other companies in order to keep operating in the US because of a bunch of laws that the government passed over, you know, privacy and security and national security concerns. So now as of January 22nd, TikTok's US version of the app is now owned by three different companies, including Oracle, which is a big data processing company owned by Larry Ellison, who's a, you know, major Trump donor and ally and a company called MGX, which is based in Abu Dhabi, which did a big crypto deal with the Trump family. And then like another like investment firm. So what's been happening on the app is absolute chaos over the past couple weeks. And I know a lot of people, you know, hear this and they go, Oh, TikTok, like whatever I don't care about that. I think we've kind of gotten over some of the, like what's right. It's like there's, there's, you still hear people go, though, that's where the kids are dancing. This matters to your life, whether or not you use TikTok, you hate TikTok. You've never watched a TikTok video in your life. It still has a major influence over your life in your future. TikTok is, I think without a doubt, it's like the sun at the center of the solar system of the internet, right? It's, it's not the biggest app in the world's social media, not even close, but it has become like the locus of online digital culture. It's the place where conversations start and then branch out into other parts of the internet and then leak into the real world. It's the cultural engine room right now. Exactly. This is a most compelling exploitation of TikTok that I've ever heard. I personally don't use TikTok, but now I'm feeling pho-mo. Yeah, it, it is a really, really important ecosystem. And what people are freaking out about now is the app is undergoing some major changes. So part of this deal that was struck among the big concerns is that the Chinese government might have control over the algorithm and they might like spread propaganda. There was this amazing hearing in the US Senate where the CEO of Bite Dance. Well, that was the CEO of TikTok, not the CEO of Bite Dance. That was interesting. Oh, right, so that's the reason. But yeah, the, I think at this home tell us the Senate said was like, have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party? And the guys like, he was like, so I'm saying a pouring and the guys like, could you ever be in a citizen of China? And the guys like, I'm saying boring. Yeah, it's really beautiful. But there is no reason to think that, I mean, make Tom, maybe you can great me on this, but there's no reason to think that your data is less safe with TikTok than it is would say, meta or Elon Musk's Twitter. There was never, we've been talking about TikTok, freaking out about it for years. There has never been a single shred of actual evidence that has been produced that anything untoward happened with the Chinese government and American TikTok data. Never. There hasn't been one shred of evidence. It's all been speculation about things that could go wrong. So this new set of companies took over. It's called the US joint venture is what TikTok is calling it. And part of their plan is that they were going to retrain the algorithm, like take the algorithm and start over from scratch and like build a new one. And in the first few days, like the first week after the app rolled out, things just went nuts. What do you mean by that? Like, what happened? So it seemed to a lot of people like, they're with censorship. So the TikTok count, the official account for the Democrats in the United States, like usually their videos get like millions of views. All of a sudden, they were posting videos that were getting like zero views or like a couple of thousand. There were some examples, screenshots and online where people said like they were trying to send messages that had the word Epstein in them and they weren't getting sent. And also there was all this weird stuff. Like if you looked at the search page, it was suggesting all of this like weird creepy stuff. Like it would suggest that you search like don't look at that mirror in your house. Like just the weirdest stuff in the world. It turned out that what was happening was that there was this big snow storm a couple of weeks ago across the United States. And according to the TikTok, a data center had a power outage and the app was just going haywire because things weren't working. Then very quickly, like everything kind of went back to normal. But what we do know is the app is retraining the algorithm, right? They're going to shift how it recommends videos, what it recommends. And people are worried that these companies that now have control over this app have these ties to the Trump administration and perhaps they could use this new power that they have to promote ideas that are beneficial to Trump or the American government or suppress criticism. And it's worth saying that is precedent for this, right? This is people are not worried for no reason. This is exactly what did happen after Elon Musk took over Twitter so the algorithm started favoring things based on differing political. He openly said that. Twitter at the time was basically in that same position of being a cultural engine room. And it really changes conversation off the app in a way that affects people's lives even if you've never been on Twitter or TikTok. Tom, to take a step back, when you said that they're retraining the algorithm, like how is it actually working between all of these companies? Like is Oracle the one that's going to be retraining the algorithm is the other company and have they have they said anything about why they're retraining the algorithm or what they're going to retrain the algorithm with? That's a really interesting question. So part of the agreement in the sale of the app is that they have to retrain the algorithm because the algorithm is intellectual property and by dance the company that owns most of TikTok. They still have like a 20% share in this new company, the TikTok joint venture. So any concerns that you had about China, it's not like those have gone away, right? China still has major control over the app. I think it's like there's this new company called the TikTok joint venture and like the company is doing it. So Oracle, the giant tech company that Larry Ellison owns is certainly involved in that process. But like you can just kind of feel that things are different on there. The videos that are getting recommended are just different and like the order of videos are different. So whatever reason they just have Larry Ellison's face in every single one. So weird. I've never been on TikTok. I've seen things that are TikToks because they come through Instagram rails. I think one of the things that I want to do is join TikTok and sort of get an idea of how TikTok works and get a sense of it. If you're even on TikTok for a while, right? I've been a big TikTok user. I actually joined it because like I felt like well, I'm writing about it. I have to be using this app in order to understand what's going on there. And I really had to force myself to do it. I was like, this is so uncool. I don't want to be used. And then like I got completely addicted to it. Like I have to force myself to put it down. Yeah. I'm a big TikTok user at this point. Would you be up for teaching me? Give me the question. I think we have to. Yeah. Yeah. You're like really, you're not participating in the modern era if you're not on there. I mean Karen, I don't know if we can we can get you involved. But I feel like I feel like this is a situation where Tom, you're the earthling and Nikki is an alien that's coming to earth. Well, and I am like the relative that's still on the other planet and Nikki's just going to have to call home everyone's in a while and explain to me what's happening on earth. Let's talk. Let's set you up with an account. I'll tell you how to make a video like what you can try and do to go viral and get people to pay attention. It could be like a nice project. We're working out in the background. Stay tuned. Although hang on. In the UK, will I be getting the Ellison algorithm or the OG TikTok algorithm? What side of the US it's the same TikTok it always was. It's connected to the US TikTok app so that the content is flowing back and forth. But you, Nikki, if you set up, you're still getting that pure original, it's like classic Coke, right? You're getting the original TikTok algorithm. But what I do want to talk about for a second is maybe why you shouldn't be worried. There are real concerns. What's going to happen with TikTok now? Who's in control? What's going to happen to the algorithm? What we saw with Twitter now called X, right, is that Elon Musk turned it into an ecosystem to promote his political agenda. Like he openly said that's what he was doing. And this was, it seems catastrophic for the app. They lost a ton of users. They lost a ton of advertising revenue. It seemed like this wasn't a great business decision. It certainly wasn't handled in a smooth way that didn't upset lots of people and pushed them off the app. I think with TikTok, there's like three different companies who are investing along with TikTok. I think that these people are more concerned about business and the TikTok app itself making money. And I think they're very worried about upsetting TikTok users and losing the cultural cashier and the force and the power of this app. We reached out to TikTok to ask them to comment. They declined. But certainly the company's position is that they are as concerned about protecting people's privacy and promoting free speech as they ever have been. That's the company line. That's what it's always been. But in the time that follows like the future of this app, people are going to be looking for examples of where things are going wrong. Where it's, oh, they're suppressing this kind of content. They're promoting this and I don't want them to. Is that happening because TikTok and its allies and people from the Trump administration are putting their thumbs on the scale or is it just that people are making bad videos that no one wants to watch? You'll never know because the algorithm is a total mystery to the people who are using the app. Okay. I need to talk to you guys about a different Superb Brad. I know that we already talked about one Superb Brad, but there was another one that a lot of people were talking about, which was the Anthropic ads. I love this. I think this is so funny. Yes. Anthropic is an opening icon better than they make the chatbot cloud. This is, Anthropic basically made for different variations on an ad where there's a user of a chatbot and then there's a chatbot personified in another person who is then basically responding to the person as though they were the chatbot. One of the ads is this guy who's trying to work out and he's struggling to work out and he's like, can I get a six pack really quickly? And then the chatbot personified is like. It's like his personal trainer, right? Yes. This is really buff dude standing next to him who has this deadpan expression and then goes perfect. That is a clear, well-established goal. It starts with and then whatever and it goes through this whole thing. The chatbot then suddenly goes and you know what else you should do instead of working out. Have you considered getting these insoles that will make short king stand taller? And like every single one of these ads then has this tagline ads are coming to AI but not cloud. I think for most people who saw this ad it was probably just really funny because obviously opening on anthropic our competitors and opening on just announced that they are going to be rolling out ads to chat GPT. This was an attack ad, right? This was basically a sub tweet back in the day when there were sub tweets because opening on X-Notic's was mentioned anywhere. There's just this reference that ads are coming and of course opening on the only company that's rolling out ads. This deeply triggered Sam Altman, CEO of opening on. He tweets out this really long dramatic essay where he's like first of all these ads were funny, second of all, seriously dishonest. And then he just like insults anthropic with like more and more intense insults as like the essay goes on. He says, "Enthropic serves an expensive product to rich people." And then he goes, "One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path." Yeah, I mean we should talk about why opening on was so freaked out about this anthropic ad. So AI industry is in this super precarious position and this like weird petty fight between the billionaires who own these different companies actually ultimately will have a direct effect on the experience that you're having on the internet. It seems like you know just this like high school drama, but this actually matters in some surprises. Yeah, 100%. This literally is the beef of the century because this is the beef that launched chat GPT. I don't know if you guys know the story like basically open AI did not actually intend to launch chat GPT as a product when they were in November of 2022. They were actually working on a totally different product which was this super assistant. It was going to be like a chat bot, but it was going to be built on GPT for and they were supposed to launch it in the spring of 2023. But in the fall of 2022 rumors started circulating within open AI that anthropic might launch a chat bot before them. And so the executives literally made a decision on the spot to accelerate the launch of the chatbot.com. In two weeks time, using not GPT-4, which the entire company was working on, but using an older model, GPT-3.5, and just smacking on the user interface that they were already developing for the launch and spring of 2023 onto this older model. And they messaged it to the entire company and also to the public as this is going to be a low-key research preview. It's not going to be a real product. It's going to maybe have a small viral moment on the internet. They wanted specifically to get the data flywheel going, so they wanted that virality to then generate a bunch of interest, get a lot of user data, and then use that user data to train up and refine the real product launch GPT-4 that was going to happen later. And instead, they popped this out and it just blows up and completely changes history, right? The reason why OpenAI made that decision in that moment is also because of the history of Anthropic. So Anthropic was founded by a splinter group from OpenAI. Right, so this is personal. Yeah, in late 2020, Dario Amade, CEO of Now Anthropic, was actually an executive at OpenAI, and he was a big fan of OpenAI. And he was a big fan of OpenAI. This is Total Wolf, Formula One's most powerful team boss. And the breakout star of Drive to Survive. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.