Xprize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis has joined a growing list of tech executives who think global surveillance is a good idea, saying “humans behave better when they’re being watched.”
Diamandis shared his opinion in a mail on X this week, and went much deeper into his beliefs in your substackwhere he described, essentially: Big Brother, but good.
“Radical transparency is coming. A future where you can know anything, anytime, anywhere. A future where no one can hide,” he wrote on Substack. “We are enveloping the planet in a ‘Sensor Ecosystem’: a multi-layered living sensing system that goes from the cameras in your home, to the phone in your pocket, to self-driving cars and humanoid robots on the ground, to drones and flying cars in the air, to a constellation of satellites that image every square meter of Earth every day.”
Diamandis’ comments come about two years after Oracle founder Larry Ellison said something very similar.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we constantly record and report everything that happens,” Ellison provided during an Oracle event in 2024.
Diamandis appears to have been moved to make such claims after hosting a podcast interview with Will Marshall, CEO of Planet, the largest operator of Earth observation satellites.
“No one can hide anymore,” Marshall told Diamandis during the conversation. “If you build a school, we’ll see the school. If you build a data center, we’ll see the data center. And the accountability will be there for everyone to see, no matter what.”
Diamandis, Ellison and Marshall are not wrong to say that much of this technology is here and spreading. It’s increasingly difficult for people to get through the day without being photographed by home security systems like Ring, camera-laden cars like those made by Tesla, or automatic license plate readers from Flock. Even if they can, they are monitored through their phones by ad networks and data brokers.
But Diamandis’ comments are some of the most forceful on the quest to eradicate privacy.
“Your children will grow up in a world without unofficial information,” she writes to parents who read her post. “Teach them that the best privacy strategy is integrity, living so that being seen costs you nothing. And fighting hard for a world where viewing goes both ways.”
Diamandis seems to treat this as inevitable, but that’s not how ordinary people respond to the rise of surveillance technology. Some cities have They covered their Flock cameras with garbage bags after reports that ICE, the FBI and other law enforcement authorities were accessing the company’s data. Public rejection of Ring’s “Search Party” feature aimed at finding lost dogs, an idea that is normally difficult to argue, contributed to the company canceling its own partnership with Flock.
Meanwhile, Meta has been dealing with complaints about its camera glasses (made in partnership with Ray-Ban) and is also fighting a lawsuit over privacy concerns.
Much of Diamandis’ post on Substack focuses on giving advice to entrepreneurs or executives on how to live in a world without privacy. This advice mostly boils down to: “be a good person.” And even he doesn’t have an answer to the question of whether people would do this because it’s the right thing to do or because they might be under surveillance. (He writes that it is the question that has been “circling” since the interview with Marshall concluded.)
What Diamandis doesn’t address is the same set of questions that tech executives often dodge in conversations about surveillance and privacy. Unfortunately, definitions of “good” or “honest” often depend on the beholder: in this case, powerful tech companies that control surveillance infrastructure.
Diamandis briefly argues that these companies are offering transparency and that “transparency is a tool, and tools have no ethics.” It doesn’t take into account the fact that tools often inherit the biases of their creators. Who decides what behavior caught on a security camera is “good” or “honest”? This question is not explored, much less answered.
All he is willing to say is that transparency “only builds trust when it goes both ways.” That balance seems complicated, at best, in a world where the technology needed to create such “transparency” is controlled by so few.
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