Glass Houses

Yesterday, I was at a customer roundtable for a company I'm involved with. B2B software companies often often host groups of sympathetic customers or would-be-customers around-a-table for a meal and to share learnings between like-minded professionals (topics often include the problem the startup is solving).

I suspect AI is the only permitted topic for customer roundtables these days and this event was no different. One of the customers raised their hand and asked if anyone else was concerned about the proliferation of note-takers, especially discrete ones like Granola and Plaud (both of which I've been a user of), because of the likelihood that the data they capture would end up in discovery during a corporate litigation.

Everyone raised their hand. Another person asked if anyone had developed a corporate policy around permissible use to discourage people from surreptitiously using these technologies at work as a solution and pointing out that unauthorized recordings are illegal in many states.

I spoke up.

I'm a firm believer that the use of these transcribers is going to become ubiquitous and will have profound social consequences which we don't understand today. I see a direct parallel between other world-changing consumer technologies which began in a legal grey-zone like ride-sharing, music streaming, or even using your personal smartphone in a corporate environment (there were huge concerns around security and data exfiltration).

All of these technologies:

• Offer substantial, direct utility to their adopters,
• Introduce undetectable harm or risk to a third party,
• And it is impractical to enforce prohibition.

As I said yesterday (to the chagrin of some), these technologies are here to stay and we will all need to get used to living in a world where we have to assume every conversation we have is being recorded. I think this is just one more step towards the total abolition of privacy we have come to accept in exchange for the conveniences of digital technology.

While I admire the sincerity and hopefulness of privacy advocates, my guess is that the world that many of them are trying to bring us back to is cooked. My best hope is that in a world where our laundry is on display all the time, we all try to be a little more compassionate and gentle with each other (if for no better reason than self-preservation).