The latest wave of AI-powered wearables is pushing legal limits and creating a new kind of privacy exposure, according to a CNBC report. The concern is not limited to the people who buy the devices. Michael Stokes, a former CIA officer and senior vice president of emerging technologies at Veilant, says the "bystander problem" is the real issue: people can be swept into surveillance by cameras, microphones and sensors embedded in products they never owned or knowingly used. AI's ability to quickly interpret large volumes of captured data makes this different from earlier generations of consumer technology.
Stokes helped develop the concept of "ubiquitous technical surveillance" during his time at the CIA, describing a world in which everyday devices continuously generate information that can reveal identities, locations and associations. He argues that the cost of making sense of that data has fallen dramatically. Where intelligence collection once required thousands of hours of human sorting and analysis, AI now automates much of that work, making it cheaper and easier to extract useful information from incidentally gathered data. As he puts it: "We no longer have these pockets of small privacy that we thought we did in the past."
Some entrepreneurs are trying to respond. Aida Baradari is the founder of Deveillance, a startup whose Spectre I device is a hockey puck-shaped gadget that scans for nearby devices and sends "adversarial signals" to scramble a person's speech before microphones can process it. Baradari says users should be able to use technology without giving up their core values or rights. The report does not assess whether such countermeasures are effective or legal, but it highlights a growing market for tools aimed at protecting people in an AI-saturated environment.