Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Your Landlord Might Be Using Facial Recognition to Spy On You

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co All across the country, sweeping surveillance laws are being enacted under the guise of "safety" especially "child safety". Courts are handing over sensitive federal data, housing authorities are deploying broadband surveillance, and tech companies across the board are pushing facial recognition with no oversight.Amidst of all this, S.T.O.P.—the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project—is fighting back. The organization has released A People’s Handbook of Surveillance to equip the public with information about rampant “smart city” surveillance. They've been calling out facial recognition tech being enacted in public housing. They're pursuing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the NYPD for civil liberties violations and more.Albert Fox Cahn is the founder of S.T.O.P. and an icon in the fight against surveillance capitalism. He's joining me today to talk about what's going on right now in America, all the sneaky new ways corporations and the government are trying to surveil us, and how we can build people-first tech that challenges power. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Wherever you see these technologies being deployed, we're going to see them being used not just by the companies who are supposed to own the data, but by anyone else who hacks in. All across the country, sweeping surveillance laws are being enacted under the guise of safety, especially child safety. Courts are handing over sensitive federal data, housing authorities are deploying broad-based surveillance, and tech companies across the board are pushing facial recognition with no oversight. Amidst all of this, Stop, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project is fighting back. The organization has released a people's handbook of surveillance to equip the public with information about rampant smart city surveillance. They've also been calling out facial recognition tech being used in places like public housing. They're pursuing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the NYPD for civil liberties violations and more. Albert Foxcon is the founder of Stop and an icon in the fight against surveillance.

He's joining me today on Free Speech Friday to talk about what's going on in America right now, all the sneaky ways that corporations and the government are trying to surveil us, and how we can fight back and build people-first technology that challenges power. Albert, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. So to start off, you're such a prolific voice in this space. Can you tell me a little bit about how you started to get into the world of surveillance and start paying attention to this stuff?

The truth is I'm just a giant nerd. So as a kid, my two hobbies were protesting the NYPD and building computers. And so I really saw even in high school this sort of looming threat from the way that the protests I was helping to organize were being monitored by NYPD officers. And like after 9-11, just seeing the growth of the national surveillance infrastructure, seeing all of the money pouring into it, I kept seeing this echo of really creepy, invasive, dystopian surveillance technology is becoming a part of our lives. And when I became a lawyer, I saw my clients being arrested because of it, being deported because of it, having their lives upended,

not just because of the invasiveness, but the discrimination and the ways that these technologies get it wrong. Can you sort of walk me through how this surveillance infrastructure has emerged? Because I feel like recently people have started to pay attention to things like facial recognition. But, I mean, you mentioned 9-11. Myself and a lot of viewers might have been like kids, we weren't paying as much attention back then. When did the surveillance? and state really start to emerge? It's come in these waves over the years. You know, you had earlier iterations during the Cold War, and then you saw this massive surge

in electronic surveillance after 9-11, with billions flowing into the NSA and the other federal agencies to have all the things that Snowden would later detail. But you also saw this multi-billion dollar investment in federal state and local intelligence sharing with fusion centers being built out around the country, sharing data. from local police departments to ICE to, you know, the FBI and others. And you saw this surge in the for-profit surveillance capitalism industry with all of the data brokers realizing that they could make so much money, not just selling our data to advertisers, but selling it to the police. And so that all has just rapidly accelerated over the last, you know, I'd say decade, decade and a half. What are fusion centers? I feel like people hear that word a lot. Can you explain how they operate?

Yeah. So this is a Department of Homeland Security Initiative. where they give massive grants to local law enforcement agencies and condition that on having this intelligence sharing infrastructure, where it's basically an office where you'll have officers from all these different agencies coming there, sharing information. Sometimes you have real-time access. Sometimes you can have just a culture of collaboration. That sounds great in some offices, right? You want collegial atmosphere, but it's very different when officers are just conspiring

to circumvent civil rights protective. So we've seen cases like up in Vermont, out in California, in Colorado, where you would have officers essentially talking to their buddies from the fusion center and saying, hey, I work for ICE, I work for the federal government, I can't access this state database to do a facial recognition search. Could you do me a favor and run this through your system? At that point, it's essentially just creating this massive loophole to pass that information from one agency to another and circumvent what few protections we have.

It's horrifying. Yeah. One thing that we also saw around the time that you're mentioning in the past decade is this backlash to big tech. I feel like after Trump's election in 2016, really in 2017, you had the media and the public sort of start to realize, hey, maybe these tech companies are not all so wonderful in connecting the world. And we started to hear a lot about the dangers of the tech companies to children specifically.

And I feel like in light of that, we've seen. seen this spate of child safety laws and child safety legislation. I put it in air quotes because I don't think these laws actually address the problem. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, where do you think that that emerge from? And what role do you think that backlash to big tech played in pushing forward some of this surveillance stuff? Yeah, it's been really disheartening, right? Because I'm one of these people who gets really pissed off at the ways that a lot of these tech platforms are impacting mental health. I'm not a fan of Facebook. I'm not a fan of Instagram or certainly not TikTok, they can be great platforms in some ways, but they can be really

harmful in others. But the problem is that the way that the discourse on children and these platforms has evolved, it's not actually addressing any of the things that are problematic about these platforms. So take Utah. They've had a couple of bills that are targeting access to, you know, websites by kids. They've had a lot of laws targeting pornography in particular. And a lot of these, laws are turning on the idea that, well, the way we're going to protect kids is by fencing off elements of the internet and saying, this is adults only. And that sounds great in theory until you realize, oh, there's no way to actually know who online is an adult and who's a kid unless you erect this sort of Orwellian tracking system that goes even beyond the horror

show we have today and really makes anonymous internet access a thing of the past. I just saw Accountable Tech, another nonprofit organization, shutting down. They're sending all the funds to design it for us. This Gen Z-led organization, I also put it in air quotes because I think they're astroturfed, but that's another story. But, you know, basically like these child safety orgs, right, that are like, hey, we need age verification to crack down. And this is how we crack down on Big Tech.

Can you talk about that positioning of mainstreaming surveillance in the name of Big Tech? Keep in mind, these sort of child ordinances, we've got to come up with a better name for these sort of like ID, ID, laws, these digital checkpoints, they are really not antithetical to the business model of big tech, right? Because with a lot of these bills, you know, big tech still gets to have children on a lot of these platforms just with certain limitations. And also, none of the restrictions that these laws implement in the name of protecting kids are actually uniquely beneficial to kids. Like, so let's take, for example, New York's law. This is called the Safe for Kids Act, where they said, we're going to

make it so you have to opt into algorithmic optimization of your content. If you're a child, you're going to have to have these limits on some of the worst dark patterns that we've seen. Great. I would love the ability to opt into a non-alcoholic version of one of these platforms. I actually unfollowed every person I am friends with on Facebook just to retroactively create a non-alcoholic version of the platform. And yet they create this idea that if we just limit this to kids, we have a way to make this platform safer adults, again, without any evidence that this is a remedy that's only useful for kids. But the really scary thing is then to implement that, you then have to have all of these creepy technologies like facial recognition, facial age

estimation, ID requirements, in order to access those sites, which then create a huge civil rights concern where people aren't going to be able to access Facebook to stay in touch with loved ones and all the things that, you know, these companies sold us as the vision of the future without having a massive paper trail that could lead law enforcement straight to your door, that could, you know, lead to a lot of the problematic uses of our digital identities that we see. So that's, I would say it's one of the problems. But I just think it's such a, the wrong fight. People keep acting as if the solution to everything we see wrong with our digital spaces is just having, you know,

these age requirements without any evidence that that's actually going to get us to the place we want to be. It also, as we know, and you mentioned, it doesn't just affect children. These identity verification systems often catch immigrants, people that might not have a government ID, like other people that need to remain anonymous for various reasons. Like, it basically just censors a huge amount of content and prevents a lot of people from even accessing the internet. Oh, yeah. I mean, a lot of these laws are written so vaguely.

they talk about screening off websites with content that's quote-unquote harmful to children. The problem is it's written so broadly that could include medically accurate information about abortion. That could include information about gender affirming care. That could include progressive political content. Like we're putting in the hands of regulators these just cudgels to aim at any content they dislike that they view as harmful to their vision of childhood at a time when we see. the rebirth of grooming narratives, the rebirth of all of these child safety rhetoric that's aimed at progressive communities, at LGBTQ communities.

And then on top of that, as you said, you're creating this massive tracking system for law enforcement. Like the idea that in order to, you know, sign into a platform as an adult, you're going to have to show your ID, creating that paper trail. Well, we work with adults who are undocumented and are worried about ICE finding where they are, we work with abortion seekers who are traveling across state lines and are worried about local law enforcement being able to track their movements. We're creating this authoritarian tracking system at a time when rule of law is crumbling.

And we see the weaponization of every power that the government already has. Why on earth would we trust federal or state governments with this additional layer of tracking in order to monitor our lives and monitor every place we go, both online and off. There's this notion that you hear a lot for people being like, well, I have nothing to hide. Who cares? Everyone has my data already. Why does it really matter if they harvest more data? We don't, we already don't have any data privacy. So what does it matter if I have to scam my face? Or what does it matter if I have to input all this info? Like sure, some people that are marginalized might have to worry, but I won't have to worry. Oh my God, I hear this argument so

often. And every time I do, it drives me up the wall a little bit further. Having privacy, having data protection. It's not about hiding who you are. It's about not handing power over to not just these companies and to these government agencies, but to anyone else who steals the data. So part of what got me focused on age verification most recently was when there was this hack of the dating safety company T. And T had been essentially trying to create this gender segregated space where women could come together and share information about dangerous men, which is, I think, a pretty laudable goal. Like, making online dating less terrifying is only a good thing. The problem is the way they implemented it is to use facial recognition, to use the selfies of their users to try to figure

out who was a woman and who wasn't. And that created a massive vulnerability because hackers then were able to break in and leak 70,000 user images onto the dark web. And so suddenly, This platform that was selling itself as a way to make its users safe was leaking their information online and putting them in danger. And that's not just this one company, but it's emblematic of any facial recognition company. Because we haven't just seen private companies being hacked for these facial recognition records. We saw Customs and Border Protection. They had a vendor that had thousands of photos hacked. And wherever you see these technologies being deployed,

we're going to see them being used not just by the companies who are supposed to own the data, but by anyone else who hacks in. And imagine how chilling that is for adults who want to go to an adult website, want to look at content that they have every legal right to, and now have to second guess how logging onto that website might be used against them, might be used to blackmail them, might be leaked to someone who wants to discredit them. That isn't an open, vibrant, democratic society. That feels like something out of 1984, which I have a pension for bringing up whenever I can.

I mean, it's also just like so much user data. I don't think people realize how much data is out there. It might not just be a selfie. It might be your information that you've input onto a website, your behavior on the website. There's so much tracking happening in so many ways. Yeah, data is power, and it can be the power to charge you a higher price when companies are using dynamic pricing. and weaponizing your data to come up with a business model of what you're willing to pay. It can be the risk of stalking when we see people who are tracked in physical space

because people can buy their location data from a data broker. It means the risk of intimate partner violence. We see all of these awful cases where people are able to use data broker tools in order to track their partners or former partners. Every type of violence, every type of abuse, every type of power and balance we see in our world is magnified when this data is open to whoever wants to buy it or whoever is able to hack in. You guys do a lot of work also with facial recognition in the real world and the surveillance state, especially in New York City and other places. Can you talk a little bit about how things are expanding? Because I feel like what's so scary to me is like we're witnessing this expansion of surveillance online at a same time when we're also seeing a lot of offline surveillance too.

every time we walk out the door. Yeah, when I founded Stop back in 2019, New York was a bit of an outlier and the number of automated license plate readers it had and the number of facial recognition scans it was doing the amount of machine learning it was using to process its CCTV infrastructure. But that is only scaled up across the country in the years since. And we see homeowners association and small businesses and small communities and small town sheriff's departments with one officer that are now deploying facial recognition and these other tracking tools as a way to monitor people's locations. And part of why I founded the organization in New York

is I see us as kind of the worst offender. And the idea is if you can regulate it here, you can regulate it anywhere. But, you know, there are 16,000 local law enforcement agencies across the United States. And more and more, they're operating like mini NSAs, buying a, data on residents using these biometric tracking tools and working with local companies. And we know that companies all across the country are deploying facial recognition routinely, and they're doing a terrible job of it. The FTC had a major settlement. This is the old FTC, back when it actually cared about protecting consumers. They had a major settlement with Rite Aid just about a year ago, where it was revealed that Rite Aid had been deploying facial recognition

stores, which happens a lot. But it was so badly done. so biased and so error-prone that there was one person, I believe from New York City, who was showing up in facial recognition scans all across the country, like thousands of pings, not because he was going there, but just because they were getting a false response to his probe image over and over again, because all of these black men across America were being misidentified as this one man. And that's part of the problem we see with how facial recognition is being deployed. It's not just creepy and invasive, but companies are really just blundering forward even when there's evidence that the system is, you know, really getting it fundamentally wrong.

And landlords are even trying to use it too, right? Yeah, we've worked with a lot of tenants in New York who've been fighting facial recognition in their buildings, and we've worked with some who actually succeeded in imposing it. They're a community activist at Atlantic Plaza Towers. There have been others across New York who've fought back. But right now, there's really broad powers for landlords to install this technology when they want. And some of the facial recognition vendors advertise this as a way to monitor how people are using their own apartments, to see how many guests they have coming over, how often guests are

there, to figure out if they're large parties. My landlord shouldn't get a say in, like, how many friends I get to invite over for my birthday. That is not the power they're supposed to have. like you're supposed to have that protection in the privacy of your own home, but facial recognition allows landlords to really get this new level of data collection on their tenants. We have legislation we're pushing both in the New York State Council and up in Albany that would outlaw these practices.

Three bills, one that would ban government use of facial recognition, one that would ban public accommodations like stores and stadiums and places like that, and one that would ban landlords. from using facial recognition. And I really think that a lot of people hear this and just have this instant revulsion at the idea that they're just going to have that perpetual log of their activities in their own home handed over to their landlord.

Well, yeah. I mean, I had a landlord years ago where we had a friend crashing on our couch and he was trying to charge us extra rent for that, like as if our friend couldn't stay for a few weeks. But I feel like these landlords will try to weaponize any deal. that they can have against tenants. We know that, especially if they're low-income tenants,

or if you have someone on rent stabilization, you're trying to get them off. And it also just strikes me as, like, you said, a huge privacy thing where it could be used against you. What if somebody's having an affair, and that data is weaponized or leaked for blackmail? I don't know. You just don't want everybody knowing

who's coming and going from your house. Anyone who says, it doesn't matter if someone else knows every other person who comes to my front door. That is a failure of imagination. Because it's not just trying to think about, is there something I want to hide? It's how do you live your life when you second guess the impression you're making on an outside observer with every decision you make? There is a psychological tax to that type of lifestyle where you're walking down the street and you're wondering,

oh, does the algorithm think I have a good micro expression or a problematic one? Going into my front door? oh, does the facial recognition have a log of me going out for groceries too often? Like, you shouldn't have to have that constant catalog of, like, ideas right through the back of your head that this is how everything could be misunderstood. Not to mention on top of that, all the potential for exploitation. Yes, we see this coming up in criminal investigations, but also in divorce cases, also in any number of civil cases.

And, you know, the more of this tech you allow into your home, the more of this tech you allow into your home, the more of your life you're opening up to the highest bidder. This is why when a friend gave me a very kind, you know, Hanukkah present of a Alexa, I, you know, one of the Amazon echoes, I took it out to the woodpile and, you know, used a max on it. I mean, it's just I give friends the gift of surveillance. How do you get people to care about this issue? Because, I mean, obviously there's the idea that we have nothing to hide, but it also seems complicated and overwhelming. And I think when people hear about this stuff, sometimes, like, there was some report recently that was like, every time you step out of your house, you're being surveilled

by five cameras or whatever. It can feel so kind of like futile. So how do you make people feel like a sense of agency? Do they have any sort of sense of agency? We have so much agency. There are a few things. So I'm a big believer in contextual storytelling, really having the narrative that speaks to the needs of the audience that you're addressing. And so if I'm lobbying for a bill in, you know, Jefferson City, Missouri, I'm going to use very different narratives than if I'm fighting for legislation in New York City. I'm going to use very different approaches than if I'm helping advocates overseas. Almost every person I've spoken to about these issues. And this is one of the oddities of surveillance as an issue. Like, we agree about so little in this country right now.

There's this universal sense of being creeped out when you talk about it. about some of the ways that this technology can be used. Because it's a matter of trust. Whenever someone you do not trust has access to this data, it tends to put people on edge. So maybe some person, if I'm speaking to conservative audiences who are much more deferential to local law enforcement, maybe they don't care about that local cop having access

to facial recognition. But they'll have a lot of concerns about federal agencies having access to it, DEA having access to it, having this sort of data collection being used by the IRS. I mean, the IRS bought huge amounts of location data on millions of Americans using our cell phone records to figure out where people have been living.

And there are a lot of people who I've spoken to who suddenly when you realize that your cell phone may be used against you in an audit, when you're claiming to live in one place, but actually are spending most of your time in another, that suddenly makes this very real to them. And the other thing that I think is a real counterweight to hopelessness in the American context in particular is just the joy of federalism, which I realize is the nerdiest lawyerly answer I can forgive.

But we have so much power to make life better at the state level, at the local level. We have so much ability to make our communities better places to pass these protections to push for better. or policies to ask our officials to not do business with companies that are violating our values and, you know, selling our data the highest bidders. And I see those fights in, you know, small towns and big cities. And it's amazing just how much of an impact you can make with just a relatively small group of people, you know, raising their voices. And that's the sort of antidote to hopelessness so often.

because these same technologies are offered for sale all around the globe, right? You can buy facial recognition algorithms and facial recognition compatible cameras in any country in the planet. But the reason why the lived experience of being surveilled in America is so different from so many countries in Europe, from so many other countries around the world, is because of the choices we've made through our political and our legal system. And so we have the ability through those mechanisms to really push for an alternative vision for the future. So is the best thing basically to just try to fight these state level age verification, sort of like child safety. I hate calling them that, but yeah, we need a better word. These like fake child safety laws, like, is it just to call the lawmakers?

I feel like we have to come up with a better name. Moral panic buttons. Moral panic laws. It reminds me of all of this stuff where people name, you know, like the most dystopian bill ever. like the Freedom Act or whatever, you know, and it's like something really evil. No, the USA Patriot Act and the USA Freedom Act are like two of the most awful and impressive visions of like misnaming something. But I really do think that these stranger danger laws, these moral panic laws, these cybernanny

bills, whatever we end up calling them, people can do a tremendous amount just by speaking to friends, speaking to loved ones, speaking to local lawmakers, cares, because we're at a moment where conventional wisdom is kind of our enemy in this really frustrating way. I hear from people every day who think they're on the same side who are like, oh, you, you hate big tech. So you must be so excited this new age law. And that's what pisses me off. I think it's been really hard to rally any sort of people like groups on the left to care because they are like, well, we don't like big tech. And it's like, Well, these laws are not actually cracking down a big tag.

No, the enemy of my enemy is my, you know, caretaker mindset. Like it's something that I'm hopeful is sort of this blip because I think that the more that people come to terms with the reality of these laws, the more the shine will come off. I would say like if at a bare minimum, if even if you don't want to go rally at City Hall or something like this, send people articles about the teens in the UK who are using video games. skills as a way to bypass age verification. Like, the tech just doesn't work. And, you know, I've been at bloviating talking head in this world for a while.

And so I'm at a lot of these conferences with the people who are pushing this tag. And the funny thing is whenever we get into the questions of, okay, let's say you're completely right. And we need to protect kids from these sites. How exactly are you going to do it? They have no answer. Other than, like, you said, this, like, mass dystopian system that is broken. and flawed and destroys all of our privacy and has just so many obscene downsides.

And there's no proof that kids need to be protected from any of this stuff. Like, that's the bigger thing is that, like, all of this stuff is predicated on a really intense moral panic driven by people like Jonathan Haidt and these other people that have absolutely no background in anything that they're writing about. This is one of those things where I think, like, people's collective ignorance around how cryptography actually works and how a lot of these tools actually work ends up coming back to bite them because a lot of people do think, oh, of course you can just have a technical way to solve this problem. I've talked to members of Congress and like state legislators who are like, well,

no, there has to be a way. And it's just like when you then are pushing back and are like, no, this defies the laws of mathematics, they still have that wishful thinking. Well, I think a lot of of people believe that tech is sort of all-powerful. And they've been told that and sold that lie by the tech industry kind of too. So they just think, yeah, there has to be a technical workaround or a technical solution to this bad thing. I think one of the lessons I've learned from the last maybe, I guess, 10 years of tech clash is that it is very easy for big tech and their supporters to shunt off.

the energy to mitigate some of the abuses of those platforms by pushing them towards shiny objects that don't actually solve it. That becomes a much more effective strategy than to actually just try to push back on the merits of their platforms, right? Not even Mark Zuckerberg, as terrible and toned-down as he is, would try to repeat his like Arab Spring narrative from, the 2010s where it's like, well, our platform is going to inspire democracy and freedom around the world and all that garbage. Like, I don't think any of the tech executives would be willing to even try to sell something like that.

But what they can do is say, like, yes, the real issue here is this debate about children. And that's what we need to focus on. Well, I think what's really scary, too, because obviously we can fight these laws. But because of this moral panic driven by the media and perhaps well-intentioned or maybe not so well-intentioned figures. A lot of these platforms are preemptively censoring content and preemptively mandating these like AI-driven age verification. YouTube just recently enacted this,

where they're not even giving people a vote. They're just like, okay, well, we see the way things are going and we don't want to be regulated too much, so we're going to like preemptively enact all of this facial scanning and AI age detection stuff. I think those companies are acting at their own risk, right? So I actually think that there's going to be a lot of interesting, litigation around whether it's legal for companies to insist on facial age verification

just because of all the evidence that's biased. Obviously, companies have invested a huge amount of money in trying to reduce facial recognition bias over the years, but you can't really say it's at zero, right? Even if you're adopting all the NIST best practices, even if you're doing everything you're supposed to, there are a lot of reasons to believe that these algorithms are going to have some discriminatory effect, which means you're going to be discriminatorially excluding people from their platform based off of the errors that the algorithm makes.

That's something that I think is going to lead to a lot of class action lawsuits and might actually push back on some of these technologies being adopted in that way going forward. And so hopefully at least that becomes a counterweight. But yeah, I see it in more and more of my digital life. You know, if I want to see,

stay on certain dating apps, you now have to do a phone number verification and a facial scan and an ID scan. And like, that is sort of something that continues to accelerate. And I do think that we've created this incentive structure where a lot of tech companies are able to quickly turn to surveillance as the counterweight to safety threats, rather than looking at, you know, the broader have questions about what actually is causing harm in digital spaces and in physical spaces connected to them. And what are the systemic solutions that might actually be less helpful for their business model? Because I think YouTube would do far more to address safety of users by having, I don't know, standards and practices around white supremacists versus efforts to age

gate younger users. Also, just so much of this is driven on pseudoscience, right? Like, these companies are responding to an imaginary threat where there is no evidence that too much time on short form video versus long form video makes you want to kill yourself or something, whatever people are claiming these days. And so it's like they're attempting to respond to just these non-existent threats, but that lawmakers, especially in Congress, tend to continue to fall for. Yeah. And I think it's tricky for me because like I am someone who thinks a lot of the claims about kids and these platforms are completely overblown. And I'm someone who, even though I'm going to have official old at this point. Like I grew up, you know, with computers I built myself dialing up to the internet and spending way, way too much of my adolescence and childhood plugged in. But that was still something that I loved at the time. And so like, I'm someone who views all of this as like, okay, I see all the reasons to be suspicious about us all spending a lot of time exclusively socializing.

in digital spaces, but that's also an invaluable tool for community building in a lot of ways. But in my own personal life, I found myself pulling away more and more from all of these spaces, which makes me much more sympathetic to the idea that, oh, what are the ways that we can sort of look at the sense of isolation that can cause and stuff like that? And real life causes isolation all the time, too. But there's no moral panic about that. And I think that's notable too. I mean, especially marginalized kids and the way that LGBTQ kids are treated sometimes in schools, like, can be incredibly isolating.

And we are doing nothing to address that isolation. Oh, God, yeah. Like, I talked to folks all the time who grew up as like the only queer kid in a rural community. And the internet was the only way they could find any sense of support and solidarity and community and friends and people who they could just be themselves with. And under laws like the ones in Utah where they're walling off so much of the internet and requiring parental consent to access a lot of these platforms, it forces kids to potentially out themselves to parents who are going to be a threat to them in order to access that community or deepen that sense of isolation. So I agree that there's this way in which we are ignoring the reality of isolation for so many in order to promote this sort of narrative of child safety. And I just, yeah, it's frustrating. I almost just view it as the successor to the stranger danger narrative of past generations where even as the number of kidnappings were

plummeting in the U.S., even as kids were safer than ever in public streets, you saw in the 90s and the 2000s this huge sense of fear about the risk that kids were facing out in public. And I see it Like, I grew up in New York City, and when I was a kid in the 90s, it was way more dangerous just walking around, looking at the numbers, but I had way more freedom to just go wherever the heck I wanted as an 11-year-old. Now that would be unheard of, and so we're importing that parental anxiety from physical spaces to digital spaces. And kids are more likely to be harmed whether physical or digital from someone they know.

Yes. And these laws can isolate kids from people who actually help them. when they've been harmed, when they've been targeted. Can you talk a little bit about the work that you're doing and how people can get involved and stop and what you guys have on the horizon? Yeah, so surveillance technology oversight project, six and a half years old, and we've grown in that time to be just a force against a lot of these surveillance initiatives across the country.

We sue the NYPD. We sue big tech companies. We are suing more and more government agencies and trying to push for laws. And really, this is only possible because of the United States. the amazing coalition we've built out and all of the supporters who have come together to help just support the work. So if folks want to join us to find out more, stopspying.org is our website, and we're Stop Spying NY on all of the social media slash surveillance capitalism platforms of your choice. All right, Albert, oh, thanks so much for joining me. Such a pleasure. Thank you for having

me on. All right, that's it for the show. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, Usermag.com. That's usermag.com. or support this show on Patreon. I cannot continue to produce this show without your financial support. Every single dollar makes a huge difference. Thanks again for watching Free Speech Friday. See you next week.