What data does in secret
Lee Schmidt was creeped out. A retired Navy veteran living in Norfolk, Virginia, Schmidt was unhappy that 176 license plate readers had been installed throughout the streets and highways of his city, monitoring his car wherever he drove. So he sued.
From the original complaint (PDF, October 21, 2024):
All of that surveillance creates a detailed record of where every driver in Norfolk has gone. Anyone with access to the database can go back in time and see where a car was on any given day. And they can track its movements across at least the past 30 days, creating a detailed map of the driver’s movements. Indeed, the City’s police chief has boasted that “it would be difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.”
As the complaint points out, such widespread data collection is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, as it allows law enforcement to spy on citizens without a warrant. “But the Fourth Amendment doesn’t allow the government to set up a surveillance state,” writes the Institute for Justice. “If the city wants to track suspicious people, it can do what the police have always done: get a warrant.” (IJ also has a short video of Lee Schmidt telling his story.)
I have a few observations:
First, it’s true that the Fourth Amendment establishes that a surveillance state is illegal. Yet the surveillance state is here, and it continues to spread unabated. The company behind the license plate cameras, Flock Safety, claims to be operating in 5,000 communities across the US.
Second, even if people have heard of such cameras, people may not understand the scale of the tracking system, watching them wherever they drive. Do you know how many Flock cameras are already installed in your community?
Third, it’s hard to conceive of just how much can be inferred from that license plate data. As the Institute of Justice puts it, the surveillance cameras allow police – or anyone who gains access – to learn “where people have been, where they tend to drive, and even who they tend to meet up with.”
Fourth, all of what I’ve just described is just from license plate surveillance: it doesn’t account for Amazon’s Ring surveillance doorbells, which give warrantless access to video of public sidewalks; street-level surveillance kiosks like Google’s LinkNYC; car surveillance via tire-pressure monitors (see my Byron Tau interview); the profusion of Internet of Things devices in people’s homes; or the many, many other ways that we are quietly watched, recorded, or otherwise tracked throughout our day.
My point is that surveillance systems are largely operating outside our awareness or consent. The inferences from the data, the sheer scale and omniscience of the platforms, the power they afford the watchers – they’re obscured or actively hidden from us. It’s all secret.
This is the point hammered home by The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance, by Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert, published by MIT Press. Sinnreich joined me on Techtonic this week to discuss the book: here’s the episode page where you can listen to the interview and see the episode links.
During the interview, Sinnreich describes how Big Tech companies are maintaining dossiers on all of us, assembled from the data gushing out of the surveillance platforms that surround us. And there is no way to opt out: anywhere we go, especially online, we’re leaving traces that will be picked up. From the book:
Whatever we think we’re sharing when we upload a selfie, write an email, shop online, stream a video, look up driving directions, track our sleep, [or] “like” a post, . . . that’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Both the artifacts we produce intentionally and the data traces we leave in our wake as we go about our daily lives can – and likely will – be recorded, archived, analyzed, combined, and cross-referenced with other data and used to generate new forms of knowledge without our awareness or consent.
There’s that phrase again, “without our awareness or consent.” The data, it seems, is meant to have a “secret” life, one that is extended as long as we have no knowledge of its existence, let alone how we might resist it.
Any solution, I’m confident, has to start by addressing the secrecy. People have to be made aware of surveillance before they can take any steps to combat its harms. And this – as I told Aram during our conversation – is one of the many reasons I appreciate the book. The Secret Life of Data makes Big Tech’s predatory behavior a little less secret.
Similarly, my aim on Techtonic – and, for that matter, in this newsletter – is primarily to raise awareness about technology and its harmful effects. I’d prefer this wasn’t the case. That is to say, I really wish we lived in a world where the tech industry was committed to creating good outcomes for people and ecosystems affected by its products. I’d much rather be writing to you about the newest inspiring innovation, or the latest intractable problem solved with digital technology.
Instead I have to read headlines like this: Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show (Reuters, November 6, 2025). No matter how bad you think Facebook/Meta’s behavior is, I guarantee it’s worse. I mean, Facebook knowingly allows 15 billion scams to go in front of its users. Every day. (If you’re not familiar with the horrific nature of current online scams, read my alert.)
Or take a look at this New York Post story, also from November 6, in which Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot spits out phrases to a 10-year-old, and then his mother, that in a sane society would result in the product being permanently banned. Instead, the creator is up for a payout of a trillion dollars.
And that’s just two tech headlines, from two companies, in a single day. The true scope of Big Tech’s harms, of course, is kept private – or, I should say, secret.
Still, even a little awareness points us in the right direction. So I’m grateful for Aram and Jesse’s book, and I appreciate you, too, spending your attention here. Let’s keep watching the watchers, as creepy as they are.
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Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good ← please join as a member
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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