Ring’s adorable surveillance hellscape

Feb 13, 2026 11:10 PM - 3 months ago 84785

David Pierce

is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host pinch complete a decade of acquisition covering user tech. Previously, astatine Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

You tin watch Ring’s caller Super Bowl advertisement and spot a tiny communicative astir dogs being reunited pinch their families. You tin besides watch the very aforesaid advertisement and see the seeds being planted for a massively connected, utterly ubiquitous surveillance strategy that will extremity the conception of privateness forever. Maybe you tin moreover spot some astatine the aforesaid time.

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On this section of The Vergecast, Nilay and David talk astir the Super Bowl advertisement that worried truthful galore people, why Ring would build a characteristic for illustration this successful the first place, and whether each this surveillance is simply a characteristic aliases a bug. Given that the Ring contention happened the aforesaid week arsenic Google recovered important (and supposedly deleted) footage from Nancy Guthrie’s Nest camera, it seems worthy debating what we really want from our information cameras, and what “security” moreover intends successful this context.

After that, the hosts move to yet different week of chaos successful the AI industry. A number of important group astatine companies for illustration Anthropic and OpenAI are quitting their jobs, and issuing dire warnings astir the powerfulness and peril of AI connected the measurement out. What are we to make of the extremity of OpenAI’s Mission Alignment team, aliases the Anthropic information leader who wrote that “the world is successful peril?” There are moreover tech labor worried astir what the advent of chatbot advertizing will do to your data, your conversations pinch AI, and the world. We effort to put each the pieces together, and fig retired what’s really worthy being worried astir going forward.

Finally, successful the lightning round, it’s clip for an other agelong installment of Brendan Carr is simply a Dummy (theme euphony by Michiel Vanhoudt), the latest Siri delays, the forthcoming Ferrari EV, and more.

If you want to cognize much astir everything we talk successful this episode, present are immoderate links to get you started:

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