recording

“Citizens will behave well because we are recording and documenting everything that happens”

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“Citizens will behave because we are constantly recording and documenting everything that happens.” It sounds like a phrase taken from George Orwell’s 1984, but Larry Ellison said it during an Oracle financial meeting. It has been two years since he spoke those words and today we can say that this disturbing vision is closer than ever to being a reality. The hyper-vigilant citizen. In September 2024, Ellison projected a future in which mass surveillance would cause us all to behave civilly. The founder of Oracle spoke of cameras everywhere and an AI that would process everything to, if necessary, “report the problem to whoever it concerns. Whether it’s the sheriff, the chief or whoever has to control the situation.” In short, a context of hypervigilance in which any infraction would be recorded and have consequences. This, which sounds like a science fiction scenario, has been silently integrated into the reality of many citizens, and we are not talking about the China social creditbut from the West, especially the United States. The State-Technology fusion. Historically, the tasks of surveillance, security and border control fell to the public institutions themselves. However, the US government has progressively delegated these critical security tasks to technology corporations. At the same time, the militarization of Silicon Valley is a reality: OpenAI and Palantir executives have been named lieutenant colonels and the big tech companies already They do not prohibit the military use of their AI. The government seeks technological efficiency, but at the same time it is ceding enormous power to private companies, with the risk of putting commercial interests before issues such as transparency or democratic scrutiny. The privatization of the US security apparatus has already materialized on various fronts. Objective: deportations. One of the areas in which technology is being used the most is border control and the identification of undocumented immigrants. At the beginning of 2025, the New York Times It said that ICE and USCIS (the agency in charge of processing immigration applications) had spent $7.8 billion on technologies. Many of these contracts were signed under Biden, but under Trump they have been taken to an even more extreme level. Among this arsenal, systems such as ELITE, created by Palantirwhich works like a “Google Maps” to locate potential deportation targets, or the Mobile Fortify app, used by agents to scan faces and check legal status in real time. The persecution is complemented by forensic tools such as Cellebrite to unlock and extract deleted data from mobile phones, rapid DNA tests and the lucrative business of prison operator Geo Group, which forces hundreds of thousands of immigrants to wear GPS ankle bracelets and the SmartLink app to validate their location with daily selfies. Not just immigrants. The alarming thing about this infrastructure is how these tools are powered. To avoid the obligation of court orders, The government directly buys information from data brokers private companies such as LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, which means that they have data on all citizens, not just immigrants in an irregular situation. During the protests in Minneapolis, where the murder of Alex Pretti, ICE used that same facial recognition software against American citizens who participated in the protests. What was built for deportations is becoming a mass surveillance system for the entire population. Larry Ellison was not wrong at all. The data convenience trap. We have accepted terms and conditions without reading them, installed apps, third-party cookies, shared our lives on social networks… While we gave up our privacy out of pure convenience, thinking that the worst that could happen is that we would be served personalized ads, we were feeding a much murkier machinery. There is tools like Clearview AI that feed directly from the millions of photos that we upload to social networks, or Locate X that takes advantage of apps that collect our location to know where we are. The services that promised to keep us connected are also the ones that keep an eye on us. The ideology behind the code. The leaders of the companies that create these tools promote a techno-utopian vision that quickly leads to techno-authoritarianism. We have the most obvious example with Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir, who said openly “I don’t think freedom and democracy are compatible.” Alex Karp, the company’s current CEO, recently published a 22 point manifesto full of nationalist and militarized ideas. Another defender of this ideology is the investor Marc Andreessen, who published his “techno-optimistic manifesto” in which he proclaims that technology will solve all human problems while stating that ethics, caution and democratic scrutiny are obstacles to progress. We also see it in Elon Musk and his accelerationist visionwhich means that technology must advance without ethical limits or democratic restrictions, because AI is the only tool capable of solving the great problems of humanity. In this context, Larry Ellison’s phrase was not an on-air prediction, it was a warning and a declaration of intent from an elite with a very clear agenda. Image | Oracle PR, Flickr In Xataka | In Silicon Valley no one dares to criticize Trump. Nobody except one person

One of the most downloaded apps for iPhone pays for recording calls to train AI models. It is a security disaster

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The sale of personal data is not a hypothesis, it is an expanding reality. Just look at Spotify: Recently a service appeared that paid those who delivered their profile and their listening summaries to resell them to technology companies. The approach was as simple as disturbing, because it became something as innocent as our musical habits. Neon Repeat the scheme, but transfers it to a much more sensitive land, telephone calls, where intimacy becomes the product. We are talking about an app that decided to convert phone calls into the new digital gold. His proposal is direct: “Speak, record and charge.” It promises users to win “hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year” simply allowing their conversations to transform into training material for artificial intelligence systems. The hook worked. In a matter of days he went from irrelevance to place Within the top three positions In the Social Networks category in the United States App Store. How neon works. The neon mechanism is designed for each call to translate into money. It promises to pay 30 cents per minute when two users of the app talked to each other, 15 cents if the call is with someone external and establishes a stop of 30 dollars daily. To this adds a referral system that offers 30 dollars for each new user. The recording, According to your policyalways affect the sender and, when both used neon, to both parties. Conditions of use. Beyond payments, the true neon reach is in its Terms of service. There the users give the company a “world, exclusive, irrevocable and transferable” license on their recordings. This permit includes rights to sell, modify, create derived works and distribute the audio in any format, present or future. To this is added a section of functions in beta, without guarantees or responsibility in case of failures. The amplitude of that assignment makes it difficult to foresee how far the use of the recordings can go. Where is available and how popular it is. Neon’s initial success was as fast as unexpected. At the time of writing this article, it is number 2 of the most downloaded social applications in the United States App Store. The application, however, seems restricted to that market: in tests carried out from Spain is not among those available or allows its download. The security failure. The story took an unexpected turn when a technical analysis revealed that Neon did not protect the information of its own users. As Techcrunch discoveredjust create an account and review network traffic with a tool like Burp Suite to access others. Shortly after the notice, the founder closed the servers and sent an email announcing a pause ‘for security’, not to mention the filtration. What was exposed was especially delicate: Telephone numbers associated with accounts Public links to audio recordings Complete call transcripts Metadata with duration, date and payments obtained Telephone numbers, recordings and transcripts are not accessible is not a minor failure. With this data, private conversations could be rebuilt and associated with specific people. The risks range from attempts to impersonate identity to the creation of synthetic voices. What Neon says in front of what we know, Neon defends that their processes protect users: anonymity of conversations, elimination of personal information and sale only to reviewed companies. However, the ruling showed that these systems are not infallible. The official communication after temporary closure spoke of “adding extra security layers”, but omits to recognize the filtration. Neon’s fall does not erase the background question: what price does our intimacy have when artificial intelligence demands more and more data? The model to pay for calls can reappear in other forms and other markets, because the need to train systems will continue to grow. What happened in the United States is an early warning that we are not talking about science fiction, but about real proposals that already touch the user’s door. The decision, ultimately, is personal. Images | Xataka with Gemini 2.5 | Screen capture | Neon In Xataka | A new generation of robots promises precision and efficiency. It also opens the door to cyberspage risks

Novel actors live moments of panic after the building where they were recording catches fire

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The actors of the soap opera ‘Juegos de Amor y Poder’, the new production of TelevisaUnivision, got a tremendous scare after a fire broke out inside the building where they were performing some scenes of the plot. The heartbreaking scene was narrated by the actor Lambda Garciawho at the time of what happened was in the company of Eduardo Santamarina. “This was crazy, we’re already outside. I’m shocked. There are many very bad people, I got very bad. It’s already happened. There are many people who are very sick, intoxicated. This is complicated,” Lambda detailed in a video it shared on its social networks. He also explained that, fortunately, he and the entire cast did not suffer serious injuries, but no one can take away the shock and shock. In a subsequent interview, which he gave to the Hoy program, the Top Chef VIP winner explained that they were on the 18th floor when the floor manager gave them the order to evacuate. “We were recording, we were on the 18th floor and suddenly the floor manager told us “we need to evacuate the floor,” he revealed before the cameras of the Televisa program. He then explained that everything got complicated from the 11th floor onwards, as the smell of smoke became more and more intense. “I started going down and on the 11th floor I started to smell burning, smoke, smoke… My throat and nose started burning, it was like I had knives in my nose,” he continued. While it is true that he managed to leave the place on his own, there were some people who did have to be taken to a hospital because they were intoxicated, while another person had to be helped out after they fainted. “I picked up a girl who was completely passed out, helping her breathe, hitting her on the back, I opened her eyes and gave her water, I don’t know who she was, but I picked her up, she is a human being,” he concluded. Keep reading:

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