Will a new law change the internet forever?

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Your sex video can end up in an office in Kenya.

Simple, but perhaps controversial truth, and that is wired headphones are better.

Once you've built an ID facial recognition surveillance state, it's really hard to roll that back.

Hello and welcome to the interface. The show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week

and your world. I'm Thomas Dremain. I'm Karen Howe. And I'm Nikki Wolf.

Today on the interface, the proposed new law that could end the internet as we know it.

The hidden human labor that's watching you. And our wired headphones actually better than Bluetooth.

So we wanted to first start today with a bit of a somber update on the news that we were talking

about last week, where we mentioned that the Wall Street Journal had reported that

andthropics AI tool Claude had been used in the military operation to bomb Iran.

And there's since been more reporting that has come out, including from the Washington Post,

that has mentioned that Claude was specifically used to analyze a lot of intelligence data

and then identify roughly a thousand bomb targets. One of the places that ended up being bombed

was a school. And in fact, it was bombed twice. So when it was first bombed, a bunch of first

responders and parents then came to the school to try and rescue people. And then it was bombed again.

So there were significant civilian casualties. Many of them under 12 years old.

And there is some legitimate speculation now from observers about whether or not

this school was identified as a bomb target by Claude. Because one of the things as you might

remember, if you watched last week's episode, is that large language models are highly

inaccurate. And they're very ill-equipped to be integrated into highly sensitive context,

certainly life and death situations. And futurism, publication actually tried to pose this question

to the Pentagon, whether or not the school was, in fact, identified as a bomb target by the air

model. And they declined to share any further information. It's all just a grim story all around.

And it is very good. With that, I think we have a really good show for you today. We're going to

talk about some hopefully more fun topics. And horrible stuff. It's a little less horrible.

It's not bad. It's not that bad. But it's bad. So Nikki, why don't you take it away?

All right. So the way into this story is a little complicated because of the way Congress works.

But a set of laws has progressed through Congress to the next stage of voting. The main one is

called the Kids Act, KIDS, Congress likes to use these cutesy little acronyms for all of

the stuff. Basically, what these pieces of legislation do is mandate age gatekeeping for much of

the internet. So on anything judged to have adult content, when the age verification, now that's

not, you may be used to clicking. I'm over 18 when you go to a site like Reddit or porn sites

or anything like that. What this will mean is that you will now have to upload a picture

of your government issued identification card. And this is really split public opinions

straight down the middle because on the one hand, yes, unoccupied we want to protect children

from seeing things that might be inappropriate for them. There's all kinds of things online that

you could make an argument for online gatekeeping. I think online gambling is one that I think

we need some kind of protections from. On the other hand, one that gives the government a massive

database of people's identification and we live in an age where there's a lot of reasons especially

in the U.S. that you might not want the government to have that kind of information about you or

private companies to have that information about you. There's huge privacy concerns and huge

surveillance concerns and also what this does effectively is change the internet in a really

meaningful way from a place where fundamentally you visit places anonymously to a system of

gated communities where your identification follows you around everywhere you go.

There's some important nuance here, right? So there's this question of age verification. If you

live in half of U.S. states or in the UK, for example, there are these laws that have been passed

that on porn sites in particular, you have to verify your age beyond a shadow of a doubt like

with either some kind of facial recognition scan that determines how old you are or like flashing

your government ID like you're saying. In the United States, it's more complicated than that. The

Supreme Court ruled on this with laws about porn sites that that's okay but for the rest of the

internet, it's like not clear that this is constitutional. So these laws like the Kids Act

are not outright saying that you have to do age verification. They're just saying if you're not

very, very sure that there are kids you're going to get in enormous trouble and then like it's the

sideways in that then you might have to do it. There's a balance here we're trying to protect kids

but then at what cost to like your comfort using the internet. I feel like we should talk a little

bit about like play out what would it look like for people's day to day lives to access information

with this law in place because this was something that I didn't fully understand that both of you

were trying to explain to me. So the worst case scenario is a government can designate anything

as unsafe and then that would mandate identifying anyone who goes onto it. So for example,

WikiLeaks or for example the Epstein files or the New York Times or the BBC. Right.

Access to information about abortion provisions in southern states where abortion is under assault

by the state government could easily fall into this. It could be almost everything. It provides

the infrastructure for a very restrictive and very surveillance state way of operating the

internet. Right now, you know, you're constantly being monitored. Everyone knows that but what if

there was that there's even more direct tie to like your real world identity, how might that affect

not just the things that you choose to access but the things that you choose to say on the internet.

The real concern here, right. This is all about at this point social media. Do we want kids using

social media under what circumstances? So like and I think politicians are thinking like social media

is an app but it's also just a vector for speech and expression and communication and information

and by putting up this barrier where it's like you need to tie your real world identity to what you're

doing that might change what you're comfortable doing online. There's a lot of knock on effect here

that certainly this kind of legislation does not prepare for and that's even before you get to

the problem that there is no good technological way of doing this. Right. Everywhere it's been

tried has been absolute chaos. There was a massive data breach at discord last September.

Which is like a gaming communicate like it's like a chat app for gamers. 70,000 people's

identification was leaked. And this was like their government ID. Oh wow. I think looking to porn

is a really interesting way to think about what's going to happen here because this is a

truism of technology that whatever the future of tech is it happens in porn first because like

that's going to wear it like the biggest economic engine is in the world. That's how the internet

is made. Right. Paul is always the canary in the coal mine. Exactly. Anything in terms of privacy

and surveillance and technology it always happens in Poland first. Everyone can agree that we don't

want children accessing pornography. Right. Like if you talk to porn hub and the company that owns

porn hub was called ALO. I had interviewed them last year for a story on this subject. They said

we're on board. We don't want kids on our website. The problem here like you're saying Nikki is

these laws make it more difficult to access these mainstream porn companies that are doing more

to moderate the content on their platform. So this attempt to make children more safe just pushes

them to more dangerous places. It seems like we're rushing ahead with this like not particularly

thoughtful solution to a problem that does have consequences that are very very clear.

This new legislation updates another piece of legislation which has been going through

called COSA the Kids Unlined Safety Act. This new legislation actually removes a clause from that

called the duty of care clause which would affect the big social media companies and was designed to

regulate their addictive structural practices that we've talked about in a previous episode.

This new legislation actually removes a safety clause for that. Do we know which of the tech

companies has been doing the lobbying? Yeah, this is a really interesting question that has kind of split

the tech industry into different parts. So meta the company that runs Facebook and Instagram

and WhatsApp, they're all in on age verification. But what they want is they want the operating systems

to handle it. They should have to check your ID because that way it's like the the responsibility

to protect kids is like no longer in meta's hands. What would it look like for the operating systems

of your devices to be doing this? Like is that supposed to be better? That's a great question.

So in the UK right now, there's a law that says essentially if you're like a sufficiently large

online platform, then you need to be doing age verification to keep kids off of

like content that they shouldn't be accessing. And this has along the way hit companies like

Spotify, Wikipedia, like you know, was freaking out about this because Wikipedia was going to

have to start checking people's ID. So it's like where does the verification happen? Does it happen

when you get to the website that you're on? Which is how like it's how the proposals were rolled

out initially? A lot of people think that's a huge problem because now the chilling effect on

speech happens immediately. You get to the site you're there and like oh my god, this particular

site is going to get information about what I'm doing here. The alternative that has been proposed

is called device based verification. Where what that would look like, there's a couple of

different ways you could do this. Whereas like one time your iPhone or your laptop or your

Android phone or whatever it is, it verifies your age one way or another. And then as you

Korean around the internet, you download an app, whatever it is, the app or the website can ask

your device like, hey, is this person over 18? And people like that a little bit better because

like there's less potential exposure like in terms of who's getting your data, in terms of like,

you know, the number of places where there could be a security breach. But everyone I've talked to

about this says that that's not a good plan either. And again, there's still this concern about

chilling effects on free speech. When there is a really easy alternative to this, something we

already have which is parental controls. Parents can go set this up and they can step in and

decide what they're comfortable with their kids doing online. Instead of the government doing it.

It's kind of interesting that you mentioned parental controls because a few years ago I did a

story about parents who like helicopter parents in the digital age who have become very obsessed

with using parental controls to monitor their children. And I hear what you're saying that it does

feel like at least a better solution than ubiquitous. Everyone gets the same rules. But there is

something to be said about how parental controls is also not the perfect solution. Like I was talking

with some LGBTQ teens who are saying that, you know, having parents who do not support the fact that

they are gay and then using parental control to surveillance control their access to health

information wasn't enough itself like a traumatic experience growing up. So like it's a more

fundamental question than actually just technology itself in a way of like this has been a perennial

problem in society. If like, who do we trust to take care of our children? That is exactly it.

In Kansas, they passed an age verification law about porn sites. And the question is what

counts as pornography? And if you read the text of this law, it like lays out every possible sex act

you could imagine. And then in the middle, they also say that you have to do age verification for

acts of homosexuality, right? So we cover every kind of possible sex and then specifically,

we're like, and gay stuff too. And Marsha Blackburn, the senator, who is one of the main

proponents of this law, Kosa, the kids online safety act, she has openly said that one of the goals

of the law is they will limit dangerous information about the transgender movement.

And exactly that same time, Kansas has passed the law saying that trans people must change their

ideas to the sex assigned at birth. It is one of the most restrictive. Right. And then all the

driveties were invalidated like overnight in a warning, right? Yeah. What we're talking about

here, if these laws go through, you know, unchanged, is a very different internet than the one that

we all grew up on. Would you rather that these kinds of laws, these kinds of protections had been

in place when you were growing up? Like, do you think it'd be a healthier, more adjusted person?

Christ no. I mean, look, we grew up in, certainly I grew up in the age of a basically completely

free internet. It was an absolute free for all. Right. The internet had a sense of freedom and fun

and hope. Now, maybe that was naive, but it seems to me that the damage that's been done to the

internet has been done by the corporatization of it. It's been done by companies like Matter,

making their platforms so neurologically addictive. Occasionally, when I was a teenager,

catching a gif of naked people doesn't come close to the kind of harm that we're talking about.

I guess the question for you guys is, we know that age verification has all these potential

consequences. We know that parental controls have their own flaws. Would it be better to rush

ahead with this stuff before we'd answer these questions because we're so concerned about protecting

children or would it be better to do nothing? Because I'm really not sure. It's basically like,

are we okay with the current status quo? I guess. Maybe the question then is like, what are the

harms that we're seeing currently that are not being addressed? And they're very nebulous,

right? This is not a law proposed because of anything suddenly that has come up, any suddenly

movement. But I think the problem with putting in a bad law and a bad structure of laws is that

that infrastructure is then there. Once you've built an ID, Basel recognition, surveillance state,

it's really hard to roll that back. Well, if this story didn't get you really concerned

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There was a recent investigation that was done by two Swedish newspapers, SVD and GP,

as well as a freelancer in Kenya, Napa Noi, Laipapa. And this is the craziest investigation because

they basically discovered that if you are a meta-raibans user, people are watching the recordings

that you are making and there is no way for you to opt out. These are smart glasses, right? We're

talking about glasses with a little camera, a little computer. You can import stuff. You see

one of the immediate problems with them came up with people recording people in public without

that consent. But also people were recording themselves, either intentionally or unintentionally,

doing very intimate acts at home, like sitting on the toilet, having sex. In one case, the investigation

found that a man put his meta-raibans on the bedside table and then left the room, but they

was still recording, unclear whether he realized that or not, then what appeared to be his wife

walked into the room, definitely unaware that the rapans are recording and started getting

undressed. And so all of this footage is gathered up by Meta. And it turns out that some of it

ends up getting sent to a third party contractor in Kenya called Sama, and the investigation

interviewed over 30 Sama contractors, as well as former meta-employees in the US, who then

revealed that there is this huge supply chain of data, intimate videos being sent to these people

for review, and your sex video can end up in an office in Kenya. People have been outraged by this,

and this investigation triggered a probe by a UK watchdog and now a class action lawsuit

in the US. So this is kind of like a crazy situation, because I mean, well, I mean, obviously, it's like

this is like, this is partly a crazy situation because of the way that meta-advertises his glasses.

So it has this page dedicated to privacy of their meta-raibans products, and at the top of this page,

it says in big, bold letters, designed for privacy controlled by you. Oh, good.

Oh, wow. And it is. What are we talking about then? That's those things. That every word in that

sentence is a lie. Yeah, so this is what like Meta's defense has been in response to this investigation

is, oh, but in our AI terms of service, which is a totally different page, there's this tiny

little print that says, we may sometimes conduct review of the things that you put into meta AI,

sometimes that will be automated review, and sometimes that will be done by humans. And then in

other little tiny print, it's like, maybe don't share sensitive data that you don't want shared to us.

Well, I think, you know, the good news here is that almost everyone reads all the privacy

policies. So you'd probably know this. Right. Well, Karen, this is one of my favorite parts

of your book. This is like something that you've investigated specifically. And there's a whole

other interesting thing here. Can you remind us like, why are there people who don't work at these

companies in other countries reviewing all of this content in the first place? Yes, I've been so

obsessed with this topic. I've been reporting on this for almost eight years. And basically,

the entire internet is built on top of hidden human labor. The reason why people in the global

north get a clean social media experience is because once again, there are people in the backend

that are reviewing all of this grotesque content to take it offline. And the workers themselves

consider this to be a career. It's not like, you know, like oftentimes when people talk about this

work, they really minimize it as its menial labor. It's, you know, it's it's drudgery. But it's

like, it's really hard. And these workers, you know, they take pride in the fact that they're

keeping the internet safe for people. There's also people that review and do data annotation. So the

the reviewing is sort of similar to what we're seeing with this meta ray bands. Data annotation is

this function where in order to even train AI systems, there are people that are literally teaching

the AI model every possible thing that it needs to know. So the fact that chat GBT can chat

is because there's literally tens or hundreds of thousands of people around the world that are

typing into open AI's large language model and showing it. This is the correct answer. This is

not so great answer. And then there's there's my my all-time favorite category of human labor is

artificial artificial intelligence. Right. Which will definitely get to at some point in a later

episode. But suffice to say, you think that, you know, self-driving cars are always just driving

autonomously. But oh no, there's actually a team in the Philippines that sometimes takes over

and is remotely driving. Literally everything that you possibly use probably has hidden human

labor behind it. Like there was a story a few years back about how Amazon Alexa was also sending

audio clips of people's intimate conversations to third party contractors as well. There was

another story about how Roomba, after they attached cameras to their vacuum cleaners,

they would also film people on the toilet as well and film people doing other types of intimate acts.

And then they were sending it to a third party contractor called Scale AI. And then the workers

were literally taking the Roomba photos that people did not even know were being recorded of them

and posting them on Facebook in these Facebook groups to talk with each other about like,

oh, like how am I supposed to address like labeling this thing or how am I supposed to review

this thing. So then people's party photos were literally going onto Facebook and then like traveling

to then public spaces because then they would leak from the Facebook group.

I think it's fair to say that if you have a device in your house or you're using an app or you've

got a thing and it's like got a system that continually gets better over time, right? It's like

these smart glasses. They're getting smarter. That means that whatever data it's collecting,

there is a guy who is watching. So, you know, you're strapping this camera on your face.

Other people don't even know it's recording and you think it's your footage, but is it?

So we reached out to Sama for comment and they got back to us saying that Sama is compliant

with international regulations, including GDPR and CCPA, these are privacy laws in Europe and in

California and that they operate under rigorously audited policies and procedures designed to

protect all customer information. Well, I feel better. I don't know about evidence. Yeah, I mean,

thing is all these companies comply with GDPR, right? And yet, you know, things still seem to happen.

But, you know, I'm glad they're not breaking the law. Sama was also the same third party contractor

for OpenAI for a hot second. OpenAI, they were trying to develop a content moderation filter that

would basically protect future users of their GPT models from being exposed to some of the toxic

content that the models are actually trained on. And so they end up hiring Sama as their third

party contractor to help them develop this content moderation filter. There was this brilliant

investigation that was done in Time Magazine by Billy Perigo that exposed the fact that these workers

were day in and day out, be exposed to the worst possible content on the internet, as well as

AI generated content where OpenAI was literally prompting its own AI models to imagine even more

grotesque scenarios to cover the basis of like all of the bad content that could exist in the world.

Yikes. And these workers were just getting like totally traumatized.

And a lot of the times the, you know, the companies that are paying people to do this, like they're

not providing them with any like, you know, preparation, there isn't like a psychologist you could

talk to if you see something that gives you PTSD, which is a real thing that happens all the time.

Like it's like just the human gears in this giant machine that we never see, you know,

from our perched thousands of miles away. Yeah, I was just talking with this worker actually

last week, not in Kenya, but somewhere else who mentioned to me, he strongly believes there's

no such thing as consenting to this work. This is the defense of contractors like Sama where they're

like, well, we ask the workers whether or not they want to do content moderation. And this worker

was like, you literally cannot possibly conceive how bad it is going to be before you have done it.

So you consent, but it's not informed consent. And so one of the amazing things about

what's happening right now is one of the reasons why we're seeing so many more stories like this

is because the workers are not okay anymore with being hidden. Like they are actively organizing

now to get their story out to make international headlines to say like, hey, we are literally here

doing some of the most essential work to make the internet function. And we are being treated

horribly. We're being paid poorly. We're being exposed to content that we never could have

possibly consented to. And that is part of like the agency that they're reclaiming now. That is

then gifting us this new visibility into the hidden pipes of the digital infrastructure that we

use every day. All right. Well, I'm tired of talking about all this kind of like

unimportant, like, unserious, fluffy stuff. I want to move on. I want to talk about headphones.

What kind of headphones do you guys use? I have wired headphones and always have, I have never

owned a pair of Bluetooth headphones. Wait, you've never, you've never owned Bluetooth headphones ever?

I've never had them. Here's my problem with Bluetooth headphones. They are headphones. They do

the same thing as my headphones, except I need to charge them. It adds an extra layer of work.

It's a perfect technology already. I don't get why I would upgrade. And it seems like the kids

today are agreeing with me. Yeah, as much as every time I talk to Nicky, I feel like I'm dealing with

one of these unfrozen cavemen. It seems like he is actually on trend here. So I'm cool.

You're so out of date that you've gone. You're so out of date that it's calm full circle.

So let's walk back in time here for a minute. It's 2016. And Apple announces the iPhone 7.

And as part of that announcement, you know, they're doing their thing where like they're on stage

and like, oh, look at our beautiful phone. It's spinning around. And there is no headphone jack.

Oh my God. I remember actually being so pissed about that. I was at the time. I was like, this is

the worst day of my life. And the same year at that same, you know, conference day and ounce,

the AirPods are new, like totally wireless Bluetooth headset. And at first people lost their minds

about this, right? Like people were the people who needed the AirPods. They make fun of them

or too expensive. People said they look like tampons without strings or like the head of an

electric toothbrush or something. People hated them. But they started to catch on. They didn't catch

on. They were forced upon us. People jumped on the trend. But there has been over the past year or

so a quiet movement growing in the shadows that is built on a simple but perhaps controversial

truth. And that is wired headphones are better than Bluetooth headphones. And I want to talk about

why. But before I do, I mean, like, it really is a trend. So there's this like consumer analytics

company called Serkana. They said that like wired headphones, the sales have been declining every

year, five years straight without a break, right? Down and down and down and down and down. In the

second half of last year, all of a sudden, wired headphone sales exploded. And I think there are

a couple of reasons for this. And one, perhaps, you know, people will want to argue about this,

the sound quality in general. You can get better sound if you pick the best wired option

than you would get if you spent the exact same money on Bluetooth.

Okay, this is a bit of a revelation for me because I also have insane behaviors around headphones.

So I was actually going to use my, I have AirPods and I was going to use them for this episode so

that we could fight about it. But then I've got to charge them. So Nikki gets a point for that.

But I never, never pay for wired headphones. I take them from my flights.

Like, every time I go on a flight, they give them to you. Well, those don't sound better than

AirPods. Right. So like in my world, I'm like, wired headphones are so much worse.

Right. Yeah, it's because you're, it's because you're taking the ones that American Airlines made.

I can't, I can't vouch for those. So it's not, it's not true. Every wired headphone

sounds better than every Bluetooth headphone, not true at all. Bluetooth is getting really,

really good. Like I went to this specialty store in New York. And they handed me like a pair of

like a thousand dollar Bluetooth headphones like really fancy like high-end specialty niche stuff

for people who like have lost their minds, you know, and I say that with so much love. And they

sounded incredible, right? But if you're looking at like more mainstream products made by companies

that you've heard of, if you pick the best possible option from a wired model and you've got the

same money to spend, the wired model is probably at least for now going to sound better than the

best Bluetooth model that's available. But like as we could see, Karen here's listening to like

the 50 cent headphones that you get on an airplane. I wouldn't be able to, I'd rather listen to

nothing honestly. So like it's not, this isn't about sound quality. So what's going on?

I think it's part of a wider trend that people are rejecting the kind of extractive business

practices by companies that will lock you in to having to buy the next thing or the last thing you

have will go obsolete and you will no longer be able to use it. And I think especially younger people

are deciding that they actually want to simplify their lives down. But not every new piece of technology,

you have to keep up with. And I think that's a good thing. The sound quality being approved,

I get that, right? The anti-tech backlash, where it's like, I'm just going to back, I'm going to

back some that's a little more analog, I feel more comfortable with it. Okay, that makes sense.

But there's a third thing that's happening here, which is like cultural and fashion trends.

Right now, all of the coolest people in Hollywood and sports stars, everyone has started switching

back to wired headphones. And you're seeing, if you look at paparazzi photos of Charlie X-X and

Ariana Grande and guys from the NBA, more and more, you're seeing these wired, the white,

porcelain white Apple earbuds dangling from their ears, which used to be, if you were still using

wired headphones a couple of years ago, like you're an old person. That's so interesting.

This actually ties back into the privacy theme of this episode, right? Like one of the reasons

that people are also switching to wired headphones is because Bluetooth is not 100% secure.

Well, I don't really buy that. Well, that's coming from a post by, not a post. It was something

Kamala Harris said in an interview, which is that she doesn't use Bluetooth headphones

because she gets hacked. So she was the vice president. Yeah. That's a much higher target.

To me, when I saw that, I was like, is that kind of a tacit admission, the, she knows the US

at least has the capability of hacking Bluetooth, which is something that we already vaguely knew.

Oh, that's interesting. But there's another thing, right? Like there's, there's this huge,

I mean, Nicky, I'm sure you see this is like this conspiracy stuff about how Bluetooth is

going to fry your brain and it's like giving us all cancer or something. Have you guys heard about

this? I had no idea that this was a thing as my brain being fired. Okay. So every single time there

is a new kind of wireless technology, we saw it with Wi-Fi, we saw it with 3G, we saw it with 5G.

Every time that comes in, there is always a conspiracy theory that it is in some ways damaging your

brain. This was a conspiracy theory about radio, when radio first started. Right. Right. There is

no evidence whatsoever that Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or 5G is in any meaningful way doing anything

and it's kind of this like health thing in 2026 where like people aren't satisfied by the fact

that there's no evidence for something because they like heard some guy on the internet and all

there's some massive conspiracy going on here. The thing with these conspiracy theories about

stuff traveling through the air, damaging your brain is so pervasive and has such a history that

the way we refer to conspiracy theorists often is tinfoil hat. That is what the tinfoil hat was

originally designed. It was for people to put metal on their heads to prevent signals from aliens

or from the government from passing through their brains. It's sold. It's built into the literal

language of conspiracy theories. It goes right back to the beginning. Yeah. This speaks to a wider

and I think catastrophic problem of the way that our internet now gives this information is that

every single thing that passes by our eyeballs has exactly the same weight as every other thing.

But it could be the as you're scrolling, you see something and it sounds plausible. Right. You

have no way of knowing where that information is coming from and that's a massive problem.

I personally, I can tell you, I am not worried. I've got Bluetooth headphones in right now. If I die,

we can do an update to this episode. But if you're worried about the sound quality or if you just want

to be cool, you want to look like the young people and be up on the latest trend, maybe give the

wires a try. It's actually kind of nice. And you can be like, Nicky, everybody likes Nicky.

And I'm cool. That's what I'm talking about.

One of the cool kits now. Yeah.

And that's our show. You can listen to the interface on BBC dot com or wherever you get your

podcast or watch us on YouTube on the BBC podcast channel. If you want to get in touch with us,

you can email us at the interface at BBC dot com or you can find us on WhatsApp send us a message

at plus 44332072472 or if you want to find us on social media, you can see all of our handles

right down there in the show notes.

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