Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Why we can’t stop doxxing people for fun

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Last week, a couple featured on the Jumbotron during a Coldplay concert in Boston went viral for being caught cheating. Within minutes of the video spreading on TikTok and X, users rallied together to identify the couple in the video using AI and facial recognition tools. Crowdsourced social media investigations are becoming more and more common, and the people conducting them are leveraging increasingly dystopian surveillance tech that police and the feds are using against undocumented immigrants and marginalized groups. Meanwhile, all of our privacy is being eroded. Jason Koebler from 404 Media joined me to dig into the origins of the surveillance-entertainment economy, how and why it evolved, and what we can do to protect ourselves. ***** Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co ***** Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzSubscribe to 404 Media:https://www.youtube.com/@404Mediaco

I don't care what these people were doing. Like, I don't want to defend them. But at the same time, I don't think that going to a concert means that anything you do there should be broadcast to whoever. And then fair game for anyone to research anything that they want to about this. Last week, a couple featured on the Jumbotron during a Cold Play concert in Boston went viral in a video that I think really defines this dystopian era of the internet that we're currently living in. Oh, look at these two. All right. Come on, you're okay?

Oh, what? Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy. The two people pictured in the video are Andy Byron, the CEO of an AI company called Astronomer, and the company's head of HR, Kristen Cabot, who are ostensibly having an affair. Over the weekend, Astronomer said that Byron was stepping down as a result of this video.

But how did things get to this point? The clip initially blew up on TikTok after a concert goer named Grace uploaded it with the caption, quote, trouble in paradise, but it soon went viral on every single social media app. It was at the top of Reddit, trended on Twitter, spread all over Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and more. Within minutes of the video being posted, users rallied together to identify the couple in the video, using information from the company's website, Facebook and LinkedIn activity, and facial recognition tools. People online even found the CEO's wife on Facebook and bombarded her with messages until she changed her name. Other

people scrambled to identify onlookers in a video. They speculated that a second woman in the video was another astronomer employee from the accounting department. Astronomer has said that this is false and that the CEO and HR head were the only two employees at the concert. The viral moment quickly exploded into thousands of memes and variations of the video online. Pornhub reported a double digit increase in searches for office affair and caught cheating. Meanwhile, misinformation ran wild, with fabricated apology statements and phony cold play concert policy updates like banning kisscams. All of this, however, is just the latest example of the surveillance entertainment economy, where, as one user posted, we all feel entitled to stalk, docks, and humiliate random strangers on a mass scale

simply because they exist in public spaces. Facial recognition and crowdsourced social media investigations are now constantly being used on random people, while the technologies that are being normalized are increasingly leveraged by the police and feds against undocumented immigrants and marginalized groups. So today we're going to dig into the origins of the surveillance entertainment economy, how it started, why it began, how it evolved, and what we can all do about it. Jason Kebler is here to help break it all down. Jason, welcome to power user. Hey, good to be back. Okay, Jason. So to start off, I want to take stock of the scale of all of this. I saw this guy, Andrew at the ringer, post this really smart post where he said, quote, monocultural events used to be like the cheers finale.

Now there when normal people get caught cheating, freak out on an airplane, or say something funny about jobs. And then journalist Julia Alexander responded, quote, we used to share in the experience of content and now we share content as an experience. I thought this was super spot on. But what I wanted to add is that the content we're increasingly experiencing together is doxing content. It's investigative content. It's the whole internet coming together to basically participate in this surveillance entertainment economy. And it seems like virality itself is increasingly intertwined with surveillance. Yeah, it's become like social media crowdsourced research for sport where people try to figure out like who is in the video and we can talk about how they do that.

But then it's like, okay, where do they work? Who do they know? What has their employer said about this situation? What has their friends? and family said about this situation. Where are there other social media profiles? Like in this case, the CEO's LinkedIn was immediately just like hammered with tons and tons of comments.

He disabled comments. Then he totally turned his LinkedIn private, for example. And it's like, we see that over and over and over again. And I guess before we get too deep in this conversation, I want to acknowledge that I saw this video and I laughed. And I was like, wow, this is like really funny. And then I was like, uh, but also this is best. I want to just like acknowledge like we can hold two thoughts, two different thoughts in our head at the same time.

Yes, I laughed. Yes, it's hypocritical, but but I also think it's bad. And we can talk about why I think like this impulse is bad. This let's doc someone immediately. Let's find out everything about it their lives immediately. And I think that this is like a high profile incident that is emblematic of things that happen to people who are not famous, who are not rich, who are not powerful, who are not CEOs all the time. When do you think that this sort of crowdsourced surveillance culture, for lack of a better word, really started to emerge? It may have been before this, but in my mind, when this started happening, was the Boston Marathon bombing.

Like, in the immediate aftermath of that, there was some surveillance footage. There was some social media footage of the finish line where the bombing happened. And this is a terrorist attack. It was something really awful. But there was a subreddit that was trying to figure out who the different people were in these clips. And nominally, they were trying to figure out who the bomber was. And there was this frenzy of people trying to figure out, like, who are the people in these videos? And they ultimately identified a person.

And it was the wrong person. And that person died by suicide, like, immediately after this. And it was a really, really horrible situation and event. But that is like the first kind of like mass, who is this person moment that I can remember. Is there anything before that that you can think of? No. It's so funny. I remember being, I worked at the Daily Mail at the time and I remember being in the Daily Mail newsroom and everyone just scouring the internet to try to find any information on this person.

And like you said, it was really this Reddit community that had come together. But it was also happening across Twitter, which at that time was very like news driven. But it was the first time also that I think we started to sort of realize how much was being shared online. I mean, this was April 2013 for people who don't remember. By that time, social media was around. It was nascent. Instagram had only launched three years before, and you couldn't really search on it. Twitter was really like the main thing, but also digging through Facebook. Facebook was not even a decade old at that point, but people had been sharing so much. And I remember being people sort of scrolling through looking. You could search for people in Boston. You could try to see who was friends with someone, you know, and sort of like trying to look at people's tagged photos to suss it all out. And I just remember at that time, too, just thinking about my own digital presence and being like, wow, there's a lot more that we can find out about people online than I think a lot of us might have initially realized. Yeah. And there's been a lot of high profile incidents like this. I think the most common is kind of immediately after a mass shooting or a really awful terrorist attack where people do try to find any trace about the shooter. And that often means trying to track down their Facebook friends, trying to find their Instagram, trying to find their YouTube. But it also means like figuring. out what like usernames they may have used on Xbox Live or like some random forum or something like that

and then sort of working back from there. And I also have had that same realization about myself where, you know, I don't think I've done anything awful, but it does make you wonder like, what is my digital footprint? And so like I've searched all of the like usernames that have ever used on like any forum or like my old Zanga, like things like this and I'm like, wow, there's like a lot here. It's become really common. I guess first journalists did it quite a lot and journalists still do it. But it's become this like broader thing where people start trying to research anyone who is part of any major news event.

So I think things started around the Boston bombing. And you had a lot of journalists and kind of like digital sleuths and like people who I think were diluting themselves into being like, I'm a helpful citizen. You know, I'm going to do my part and try to find this person. So that's April 2013. By December 2013, we have another moment that I think is. closer to kind of what we're seeing with the CEO, which was the Justine Sacco tweet. I'm sure you remember this.

I do. Has Justine landed yet? Yeah. So exactly. This woman, Justine Sacco, who at the time was this corporate executive was on a trip to Africa. She had posted something incredibly offensive. It was like going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS.

Then she logged off and was on a flight for like nine hours or whatever. And while she's on the flight, her tweet blows up. This ends up being this mass moment online when everyone's, sort of comes together around this hashtag has Justine landed yet. And throughout those nine hours, not only was it this like anticipation of like, wow, what's going to happen when she gets online and realizes that everyone's seen her bad tweet, but it was also like, let's dig up everything about her. Like now we have these nine hours to sort of like collectively research everything about this woman who has done something bad. And I think we very quickly saw a lot of

the tactics that were used around the Boston bombing just months before suddenly being used against this like this random lady. Right. Yeah. I mean, I do remember. I remember being online that day. I worked at Vice at the time, and I just remember entire news cycles occurred while she was on this flight, where first it was like, here's the tweet. Then it's like, here's who this woman is. Then it's like, the internet is researching this woman. And you had like multiple phases of virality before she even landed. And I think, and I'm sure you felt this as well, but there was definitely a period on the internet where it's kind of like anything goes because anything that was trending would get a lot of traffic.

And so it was like a self-feeding frenzy because Justine Sacco probably started trending on Google. And then she started trending on Facebook. And then you could really write like any headline and it would get traffic. And at that time, traffic was really closely tied to like whether a story was important or whether people cared about it or not. Yeah, exactly. We started to see this like clickbait culture emerging and the SEO articles about like who is XYZ viral person that everyone's talking about online were popping up right at the same time that like digital news was also becoming a thing. So you had like mashable buzzfeed. I worked at mike.com. Like, you know, they would just sort of like

create this like viral chum around these previously totally unknown figures. The other thing that was happening around this time and that is still happening was the rise of open source intelligence as like a hobby but also a research tool. And so open source intelligence is exactly what we have been discussing where it's like you use information that is on the internet to research a news story or something like that. And so the methods for doing this started to get really sophisticated where you had not just people like you and me who like I didn't have any specific training in exactly like how to research someone. I was just someone who's like on the internet a lot and was good at clicking around social media and doing like advanced searches and things. But then you also had people who may have

had like an intelligence background who may have like formerly worked at the NSA or the FBI who started using some of the things that they learned within the government to start researching things like the rise of ISIS and like doing things like looking at satellite imagery. And this was like really important work and can be really important. And it's been used to find like atrocities done by Israel. It's been used to find like hidden terrorist camps and things like this. But, like, these same tactics have filtered down to research, like, incredibly frivolous things. Yeah.

I mean, the ISIS accounts, like, back in the early 2010s were such a real thing online. Like, there was the James Foley beheading video, like, around this time as well. And I remember people, like, you know, taking screenshots of the background and looking at it on Google Earth to try to sort of, like, determine where things are. All of that sort of, like, building. And then I think we start to see in the mid-20s, also just these viral characters emerge on the internet without their consent. Like a year later, after the bombing, you see Alex from Target,

who's just this random kid at Target that somebody takes this photo of and posts it on Twitter and goes viral on Snapchat. And I think of Ken Bone, actually, throughout the 2016 election. Like, he was a guy who kind of went viral for being this, like, undecided voter on TV. But very quickly, everybody looked up everything about him and found his Reddit history. And the discourse around him immediately became around, like, sort of his online presence. This is probably around the time the phrase,

milkshake duck took off. I don't know the exact timeline of that or even the exact origin of that, but it's a meme where someone goes viral for whatever reason. It's almost always a random person. And often the reason that they're going viral is because they did something cool. Like it's like, oh, I'll look at this like thing or person that you really like. And then people do like tons of research about them and they're like, oh, we regret to inform you that this person said something really racist like somewhere or like anything like that. It's like, we regret to inform you. We found something bad that this person did online. Yeah. Milkshake duck actually also comes in 2016. It's right around the Ken Bone time. And it's from this really famous tweet from this account, pixelated boat that was sort of like an internet poster.

And it's from this viral tweet when he said, the whole internet loves milkshake duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes. Five seconds later, we regret to inform you the duck is racist. It's this idea of like, we all have this viral guy. actually, they're problematic. I think we really started to see it accelerate actually after Trump was elected. You started to see a lot of people that had this like justifiable outrage over the Trump presidency and sort of looking up other people and being like, well, you participated in this. You said something racist back in XYZ.

You did this. And that really accelerated with actually the beginning of these like Karen videos in 2018. Yeah. I mean, I remember I can't name the names of all of these people, but there were so many people who were like who would get a high profile job or. or something like that. And then you had primarily, I feel like right wing podcast personalities, like research their old tweets and find something that was either hypocritical or racist or bad. And then that person would like get their job off or rescind it or something like that. And then yeah, the rise of sort of Karen videos where people would film these like often really horrific and often pretty like racist interactions where, you know, someone was acting crazy on a plane or was.

calling the cops on someone delivering a pizza, like things like this. And then the internet would start researching, like, who is this woman? And let's tell her employer about it. There was the barbecue, Becky video. There was also permit Patty. You also started to see the opposite. So we, I think this was also when people were looking into like white supremacists and around Charlottesville. And then these protests after, I think people were like, who is the secret Nazi?

Like, who has done bad things? Like, who are some of these big white supremacist figures online? In 2019, there was a. a bunch of scrutiny around the March for Our Lives Kids. And Kyle Koshav had his admissions revoked from Harvard, I believe it was. He was a Parkland survivor who had posted a bunch of racist comments in the past. And that was the same year you also had the Covington kid where there was this kid who was featured in this viral video sort of smugly looking at, you know, Native Americans.

And it was, there was all these sort of like implications that the media put behind it. But there was this like rush to look up everybody's like complete online history and sort of determine, like, are you like a good or bad person? Around this time was when a lot of the sort of, I would say, like, technological advances started to happen. Like, I remember around that time, there was a tool that could recognize white supremacist and Nazi tattoos. And so, like, a lot of people would have masks on at, at these, you know, Nazi rallies, like

actual Nazi rallies. And there was, like, computer vision tools, sort of rudimentary ones being released that would allow you to determine based on a tattoo, like what that tattoo was. And then from there, people could start sort of researching whether they could find other photos of that tattoo in someone's social media or something like that. And so this is like really around the time when things started getting more than just like, oh, I'm really good at Googling. It's like, I'm getting like good at sort of using these technological tools to do some of this

research for me. And Twitter seemed to be like the next. of a lot of this. And I think even actually into 2020, because 2020, we had Amy Cooper, the Central Park Karen, who was also involved in a viral video when she sort of got into an altercation with a birdwatcher. You had people also in the early days of the pandemic trying to basically docks people that weren't taking COVID precautions, you know, taking photos of someone and being like, who is this person? Like, they're not wearing a mask outside or whatever. There was also a lot of videos of people who would like, accost others for wearing masks or like when employees at like, like, Target or whatever would say, like, you can't come in here without a mask. A lot of people reacted to that very violently and often there was video of it and then there was like research into like, who is this person? A lot of that was happening on Twitter. But by the end of 2020 and I would say early 2021, I think most of it had moved to TikTok as

this sort of like viral surveillance culture is happening and like Twitter was sort of formerly the nexus of it, I think TikTok supercharged it just so aggressively by leaning into like algorithmic discuss. Yeah, I'm really curious what you think here because I can think of a few accounts that also on TikTok would sort of demonstrate how they were doing this research and then those videos themselves would go viral. There was that guy who would like guess how tall you were based on like a couple different images and things like that. And it's like this was all consensual and honestly like pretty cool. But he would show exactly like how he would do some of this research like compare your photo to like a known. length in another photo and, you know, sort of like show the calculation and how he was doing it.

There was also like people who were able to geolocate you. Like this is sort of before the geogesser guy, Rainbolt, but there was like, post a picture of yourself like in any parking lot and I will find out where you are. And then there were different accounts showing how they were doing that. And those went viral like all the time. And so I think it really popularized this idea of doing it for sport and for like pretty frivolous things. And for content in itself, like, yeah, we had the rise of the consensual doxing videos on TikTok, which in some ways are great, right? Because they educate people about, like, privacy.

Also are seeing this like generation of internet users, like Gen Z also really kind of come into their own on the internet 2020 after. And they've grown up in this world. Like they understand how to search things. They understand a lot more than just like you said, like the sort of standard Googling. The quintessential example of this to me to. of sort of like trying to find someone and TikTok really coming together with this mob sort of mentality around it was the West Elm Caleb incident which was it was sort of started around the end of 2021 and into January 2020 do you remember West Elm Caleb so I do but I feel like you

remember him so much better than me I like I'm gonna forget stuff so I would prefer if you ran us through it one of my many online cancellations was January 22 to the point that I had to have a meeting with the New York Times to like where I was working at the time to like explain to them like what was happening and like why so many people were writing into the new york times telling them that like i was abusive and needed to be fired basically west dumb caleb was a boy for lack of a better word okay this guy was a like he was dating lots of women this is a young guy in his 20s i actually wanted to profile him for the new york times he said absolutely not so good for him he sort of deserves his privacy after what he went through but this guy you know he had dated multiple women around new york city and was kind of not being the best

guy, right? Like he was sort of ghosting them. Like he was toxic. He was quote unquote love bombing. This guy never assaulted anyone. This guy never did anything criminal. He's just kind of a to some women, right? Of course, these women all end up making videos about him online and basically saying, hey, Wes Elm Caleb is a jerk. This is also around the time that like you're starting to see the emergence of the R. We dating the same guy Facebook groups, right? All these women came together and it set off this sort of firestorm on TikTok where not only did they docks him quickly, But they jeopardized his employment. I think he ended up actually losing his job over this.

And then they looked up absolutely everything about him. And to the point that he was being harassed in the COVID testing line, everyone just came together to destroy this man's life over, you know, yes, I'm like he was a dick. But the video that I made at the time was like, hey, slow down. We should be careful. Like you guys are now at this point, like posting his family members address and stuff. You know, like this is too much.

And that was the first time I think where like TikTok had been exposed to this idea of like, maybe we shouldn't all dock someone. Like now I think if I had made that same video, like there are more voices of nuance, but at the time people were so livid, I guess that I was coming out, quote, unquote, in defense of this guy. I think the algorithm like feeds this like frenzy.

Like it reminds me of like the Justin Sacco. It's sort of like that frenzy and that state of mind, everyone experienced on Twitter in 2013 around Justin Sacco, it's like that 24-7 on TikTok. Yeah, the thing about TikTok is that it happens from accounts that have very few followers, It'll be someone like talking about how their boyfriend, like they went through a messy breakup and he ghosted her or something like that. And then this account will have only, you know, 100 followers or something like that.

But the video itself will have millions and millions of views. And then there'll be an entire content ecosystem around it of people stitching the videos of people, commenting on the videos of people, green screening the videos and comment, like, you know, giving their take and that sort of thing. And I feel like that did happen on Twitter with random people occasionally. But I feel like it happens every single day on TikTok with pretty random people. And like you mentioned, I think there's this like influencer economy around it. Where like if you are the one to sort of co-olate a lot of information on today's viral character, that gets you clout. That gets you followers.

And suddenly like you're getting discovered and fame through it. Whereas like previously I don't think that that was happening on Twitter. I totally agree. I think that I'm on TikTok a lot. Like I'm a consumer of TikTok, you know, every single day. and I find myself often sort of like missing the original video that people might be talking about, but seeing a lot of the content around it.

And then having to sort of treasure hunt for like, what are people like actually talking about here? And having to click the blue links that show up at the top of different comments. And often a lot of the comments are like, what is going on here? And then someone will explain and will have made videos about it. And it feels like there's just like an entire content

ecosystem around this that does exist in normal media where you know, you have something like the astronomer CEO and there will be articles explaining like here's what's going on. But I think it happens every single day on TikTok in this influencer slash TikTok journalist ecosystem where it doesn't pierce the like mainstream. Are there going to be articles about this as well? But it'll all be happening on TikTok and millions of people will see it. But it will be, it will like remain contained within TikTok.

Well, TikTok also like it takes like the SEO brain of like, like digital media in the 2010s and like puts it on steroids because I think once somebody is trending or once somebody's name is becoming popular on TikTok, all of these content, these like news content creators are incentivized to like create explainer content around it. One thing I think also that starts happening and obviously this really came to like around the astronomer CEO, but like if there's also just like multiple angles of everything. It's very rare that there's just one viral video where there's just like one person recording. Now it's especially in a concert tons of people recording, but you start to see multiple angles of each viral video and each person that sort of comes out has like a new take on it.

And actually following the Astronomer CEO debacle, I actually saw TMZ published other footage from other people's cell phone cameras where you could see them kissing earlier in the night. And we've seen this also with just like protest footage and everything. It seems like there's just more footage of everything that's happening. And so when these viral moments come out, it's not just the viral video itself. It's all the other angles that you're getting of it. Yeah, algorithm, please give me the other POV. Yeah, you wrote in your piece.

It's the sort of like TikTok, help me find him or her meme, but like just accelerated. I want to kind of talk about like also just the tech that makes this possible. You mentioned, you know, how it's evolved kind of throughout the years. But I think it's happening at such a fast rate now where like as soon as these videos go viral, we know exactly who these people are in seconds. And that is thanks to the rise of surveillance technology. And can you talk through some of like the tools I think that people are using to find these people because I think it's like, yes, it's social media. Yes, it's collective crowdsourced stuff,

but it's also things like PIME's, right? And like these AI tools. So how did those play a role? Yeah, I mean, this is the part where I think I'm going to be like really tis tis, like, high-minded about this sort of thing because there is this tool called PIME's that is a facial recognition software that you can upload the image of someone's face and it will search the internet for matches. And it has become very common for people to use this technology to find people. Whereas in the past, finding out who this CEO was might have required someone who knew them to see the video or like just a lot of detective work. This can now be like a few screenshots from the video, upload it into this website and it will return who that person is,

like other places that person's face appears on the internet. And so not only can you like figure out who the people are, but you can also find out a lot about their online presence because sometimes it will show drunk photos of them, blogs where they uploaded a head of shot 14 years ago, things like that. And it's like the rise of PIME's and then also this technology called Clearview, which does a very similar thing, but for police, that is really, really concerning to me because this is technology that is used by the cops, like, largely. But now you sort of just have, like, random people using it for sport against people that they see on TikTok. And in this case, it was, like, a rich man who, you know, is the CEO of an AI company. He's, like, very unsympathes.

Let's say, but I have seen this same technology used against people who are like dancing weird at Taylor Swift concerts. Like there was an entire TikTok account that had a lot of followers. It had hundreds of thousands of followers and it had millions of views. And people would upload a video from Taylor Swift concerts and they would say, hey, I want to figure out who this person is because I was too shy to talk to them. I thought they were really hot or this person was screaming the whole time and it was really annoying. And the person who ran this account would use PIME eyes and they would use other facial recognition tools. And they would dox this person. And like that impetus to sort of just like take any random public video and figure out exactly who is in it,

I think is really dangerous. And I think it's just sort of like the normalization of surveillance. I mean, you mentioned like ring cameras in your piece too. And I think so often this stuff is also like, who is this suspicious person? Like I'm in the next door community for where I live. And there's so many posts where people just share a photo of somebody walking down the street or a screenshot from one of their ring cameras. And it's like, who is this person, find this person. I want to know if they're suspicious.

Or I saw this person walking down the street and they look suspect. It's always a person of color. Like you said, I think we've just normalized the use of these really aggressive surveillance tools. At at the same time, too, when the police, obviously they use them, but they're using them so much more explicitly. I think you guys did another story too, but of ICE, like using this facial recognition app where they just sort of hold it in front of someone's face for a minute and they can like determine exactly who you are. That's exactly right. It's like facial recognition tools in the past required like pretty advanced cameras that were pretty like they were tied to the internet at that moment.

And you know, the databases were often pretty limited because it would be like local cops looking up local mugshots and things like this. And then with the rise of PIME eyes and Clearview and these other new facial recognition databases, cops buy access. access to these databases and from their phone, they can point their phone at you and say like, hey, who is this and look you up? And we have just done reporting where ICE has a brand new app that does exactly this. And the databases that are it's tied to are like the databases that like when you enter the country, they're tied to like airline databases because increasingly you board planes without using a boarding pass,

you just use your face or you can go through TSA without giving them your ID. You just give them your face. And so these tools are getting like really, really powerful. And I do think that people are concerned about it in an ICE context or in a DHS type context. But these things are like very serious and very boring to a lot of people. We literally published my article about Astronomer and the article about ICE's new technology on the same day. And I think 40 times more people read about the Astronomer CEO. Some of my thinking about this is like, yeah, these

people are not super sympathetic. I don't feel that bad for them. But if I can sort of like raise the idea that we shouldn't be like willy-nilly using facial recognition tools against random people on TikTok, maybe the next time someone sees an article about ICE doing the exact same thing, they'll at least have that context, like that this is not just being used by the police. It's being used by regular people all the time. And I think what's also extra terrifying is that we're seeing all of this stuff happen and the normalization of facial recognition and AI sort of identification tools happen also at a time when the government is seeking to remove anonymity from the web. And this is something that the Democrats have

really been leading the charge on with the Republicans where they want to use age verification to get everyone's face, tie all of your online activity to your offline identity through these kids' online safety bills or these anti-AI bills where they say, oh, well, we need your identity to protect you against deepfakes. So it's good that you have to scan your face before using every app on your phone or whatever. Obviously, that data will then just be used by the government. It can be used against you. It is really scary. And I think that we're seeing people just completely comfortable with not only violating other people's privacy across the internet, but also like sacrificing their own privacy. Yeah. And it's also happening in the exact same context as a bunch of cities and states

passing mask bans. And so I see a lot of people on the internet. say, well, like, maybe you should wear a mask when you go outside. And it's like, yes, maybe you should for COVID reasons. Maybe you should if you're going to a protest. But that's being criminalized by Democrats, by the way. Exactly. And so it's happening in this context where steps that people would take to protect their privacy are disappearing. And I think it's so hard to get anybody to care about tech policy and COVID and masking. We have seen literally no groups aside from sort of a couple, you know, disability justice groups basically fighting these mask bans and fighting fighting against it like no big leftist groups no progressive social justice organizations like they have just completely dropped the ball on all of this stuff i mean in some sense i understand there's so much going on but i think this stuff is going to have significant implications also a lot of people have gotten really mad at me for this article and i totally understand it because they look at this and again this these people are not super sympathetic they're rich they're CEOs they're

multi-millionaires and they were sort of flaunting this relationship in public. But the most common sort of response that I've seen is like, well, maybe they shouldn't have cheated in public. And it's like, yes, like maybe they shouldn't have. And they were also saying, well, there's no expectation of privacy when you go to a concert and you show up on the Jumbotron. I've been to many sporting events. I've been to many concerts. I know how Jumbotrons work. Most people don't mind being up on the Jumbotron.

Most people like start dancing and having a good time. But I've also seen. I've seen lots of kiss cams and things like this where it's like, these people don't want to be on screen. These people are not dating. They don't want to be kissing each other. Like something weird is happening. And at the same time, over the last few years, like I go to a lot of baseball games. I go to a lot of basketball games.

Increasingly, you need to scan your face to get into the arena. At the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles, you can't scan a barcode to get into that anymore unless you want to go to one special line that they have for the entire arena. Otherwise, you have to upload your face. You go through the turnstiles and then you use your face to pay for everything. You go to concessions, you have to use your face. You want to buy a beer or you have to use your face. And it's like this has just become so normalized anywhere that we sort of interact in public. And I think that I don't care what these people were doing.

Like I don't want to defend them. But at the same time, I don't think that going to a concert means that anything you do there should be broadcast to whoever. And then fair game for anyone to research anything that they want to about you. Yeah. Well, there's this idea. like every time you leave the house, well, you're stepping into the public realm of the internet then, and anybody has the right to surveil you. And in a sense, like, I mean, obviously I'm a huge defender of free speech rights and the right for people to, you know, document things, especially journalists. But I think we need better norms around it. What's so scary too, Jason,

is that like, and you know this too, is like, this tech is always weaponized against unsympathetic people first. Like, you always hear this argument, especially when the government wants to use some sort of invasive new technology. It's like, well, we're using this against, these like unsympathetic people, right? Or like, oh, well, it's fine to sort of mass surveil bad people. But then that line, like the goalposts constantly move more and more and more until it's just normalized against everyone. I keep thinking about the Apple versus FBI case, which is like the San Bernardino shooter had

an encrypted iPhone and the FBI wanted the data off of this iPhone. And Apple would not unlock the phone. And the reason that Apple wouldn't do it is because they said, if we unlock the phone for for this terrorist who killed a lot of people who did something really awful, you're going to ask us to unlock the phones of people who are driving without a license, undocumented immigrants, so on and so forth. And that's exactly what has happened because the way that the FBI ultimately got into that phone was they got a third party company to hack the phone. And now that third party company that hacked the phone hacks the phones of random petty criminals all the time. And I think it's a sort of similar case where you

had groups like the ACLU defending Apple saying, like, no, we're not going to give you the data off of this terrorist's phone. And there were people at the time saying, well, if you're worried about this, just don't be a terrorist. And of course, like, don't be a terrorist. At the same time, it's not going to stop at terrorists. It's not going to stop at like the CEO who was cheating on his wife or whatever. And it's all we've already seen, as we talked about a lot on this podcast, like it's being used against random people all the time. And also, what is Terrorism, like speaking out against Israeli war crimes, like, you have to sort of think of how this technology would be used in the hands of the worst government, the people that hate everything you stand for. And think if you'd be comfortable to that. Which is increasingly, like, not that hard to imagine because we're seeing it happen in real time. We are seeing ICE use facial recognition technology against people who are working at hot dog stands, against people who are working outside of a Home Depot offering to help you build a deck or whatever. Like, these people are not violent criminals.

But they are having this technology deployed against them by the police and by our government. And so it doesn't take like a lot of imagination to think about how this could go wrong because it's already going wrong. And I want to just, if there's anybody listening that's like, well, then we should make this illegal. And you hear this a lot actually from people on TikTok that are like, well, we should make it illegal to film strangers in public or whatever. That is also not the solution because that will actually lead to even more authoritarianism. And I worry about that too because I think like the people that might listen and be sympathetic to this stuff, like they want to kind of do something better. They want to like protect people's privacy. And so then they think, well, actually we can get the government to pass these laws.

And that's what we're saying right now, which is like the government is sort of able to leverage people who do sort of feel some unease about this and push them into actually censorship legislation that then the government can use to even further sort of silence people. I don't know if you've been following. This is this is such a great point. I'm so glad you brought it up because we've been talking about this for a while. But like, these technologies can be used in very important accountability type ways. Like, I don't think people should stop filming. I don't think people should stop uploading things to social media. Like, I use some of these techniques for some of my journalism sometimes when I try to think deeply.

Like, is this worth it? Is this person, you know, worth sort of like identifying? But like, you said the word norms earlier. And I think that that is really the only solution. It's just like, we as a society need to not normalize. doxing people who are sort of like just outliving their lives. If they're doing something like really shi or really terrible or violent or acting against like marginalized people, then like, sure, maybe, like, depending on what is going on. But I think the fact that these tools are now so readily available, people are just doing it to anyone and everything for whatever reason they feel like.

And I think that there does need to be some like introspection about how and why and when we're using these technologies. And I think norms around filming other people and the content that you put on the internet. Like, I'm sure the first person who uploaded that video of the kiss cam to TikTok, like, they were just thinking, wow, this is a really funny moment. I'm going to upload it. But I guess, like, I want people to think a little bit more critically before they upload content of other people without their consent. And again, we don't want to live in like the UAE or elsewhere, at least authoritarian regimes

where like you need consent to like film a video of someone. But I think just having better norms around blurring people. people's faces or cropping things in a way to kind of protect people's privacy. Like we are seeing a lot more of this in protests and stuff where I think there's this collective understanding of like, okay, if somebody's doing something dicey at a protest, like don't upload a video of their face like that will be used against them. But I don't know. I mean, I live, we both live in LA.

Like I feel like just walking down the street sometimes you're in a bunch of people's TikTok videos. And I wish that people just had a little bit more respect for other people's privacy and didn't immediately film other people for content. I think that's really well said. I agree entirely. I don't even have much to add to that. I think you're absolutely right.

And also, I mean, we've touched on this a little bit, but I just think AI is going to make this entire problem so much worse. Yeah. I mean, facial recognition is machine learning AI adjacent technology. And I think that there are a lot of AI social media research tools. And a lot of these tools are being built for the FBI for federal law enforcement. But they're going to trickle down, you know, regular companies. of have access to some of these tools. And I wouldn't be surprised if like social media monitoring tools eventually trickle down

to be free or cheap or people can just like use them for whatever. And all of these are like AI powered. And so you're absolutely right. The technology is getting a lot scarier, a lot more accessible, a lot cheaper. And people don't really seem to have much of a problem using them. Yeah. We've seen a bunch of like pro-Israel activists actually use AI to like mass scan the social media of anti-war activists and other people that have seen.

have spoken out against Palestine and we're seeing more accounts just have access to this type of technology as it's democratized. Scary times. Scary times. Well, Jason, thank you so much for chatting with me about all this today. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Please check us out of 404 Media. We're on YouTube. We have a podcast and we're 404Media.co. You guys are doing some of the best work on covering all of this stuff. Thank you so much. All right. That's it for the show. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture

newsletter, UserMag. That's usermag.co where I write about all of this stuff and more. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Also, my best-selling book, Extremely Online is now finally out on paperback with a brand new cover. Pick it up wherever books are sold. Thanks so much and we'll see you next week.