alt.hn

7/5/2026 at 5:05:57 PM

A sociotechnical threat model for AI-driven smart home devices

 https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09239

by dijksterhuis

7/5/2026 at 6:45:24 PM

I think this is getting upvoted because the headline is about surveillance with a LOTR reference. The subject is about surveillance cameras that people put in their own homes. I see all of these comments about “the panopticon” or surveilling board members and CEOs from people who have apparently not realized this is about people’s private homes.

The authors use prose and structure to look like a scientific study, but they only interviewed some domestic workers and didn’t consider anything else, like the homeowners.

I’m sorry, but if I invite a contractor into my house I’ve been putting temporary cameras up. It’s helpful to see when they come and go and it’s invaluable if anything goes wrong and contractors start pointing fingers at each other. Would be great if we lived in a world where everyone was trustworthy without a second thought, but we don’t. If you don’t want to put cameras up in your own home then I support you 100%. If a contractor doesn’t want to work in my home with cameras then I completely support their decision too.

by Aurornis

7/5/2026 at 8:10:21 PM

It’s your house, so fine I guess. How do you support that decision? A little “terms-and-conditions for entering,” posted on the doors, or something?

by bee_rider

7/5/2026 at 7:17:00 PM

[dead]

by black_13

7/5/2026 at 6:51:19 PM

Someone should train models to generate clickbait using this.

by jsLavaGoat

7/5/2026 at 6:10:43 PM

Should domestic workers not be surveilled while doing their job?

I get the threat of pervasive AI but this hardly seems like it.

by gsibble

7/5/2026 at 6:24:45 PM

That depends entirely on whether you want to culture a humane trust society or a transactional surveillance society.

by swatcoder

7/5/2026 at 6:30:54 PM

I’m not sure an absence of surveillance is what creates “humane trust”. I’m certain we had locks on doors and security guards before the internet.

by DriverDaily

7/5/2026 at 7:04:07 PM

Trust involves risk - someone has to be willing to risk having their trust violated. The problem in modern western society is that we’ve decided we’re unwilling to take that risk, and therefore we’ve begun imposing what’s effectively a panopticon state on those with less power than us, with the consequence that the kinds of things we with power get away with fine - driving over the speed limit, being a couple minutes late to get a task done, getting sick or injured - cascade into severe circumstances by the cold logic of the system we’ve built to make ourselves feel better (job loss, money paying fines instead of food or medicine, etc).

The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work, and if the company you’re paying to provide a service doesn’t trust their own workers enough to not keep them under constant surveillance, go find one that does. The panopticon is a cheap answer that lets us pretend we don’t need to put the work in to manage our own lives while leveraging the power of the state to subjugate everyone further down the socioeconomic ladder from us.

by roughly

7/5/2026 at 7:34:02 PM

> imposing what’s effectively a panopticon state on those with less power than us

I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.

> The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work

Why only these two choices? The worker is free to not take the work at a place with cameras. No one forces them.

by reliabilityguy

7/5/2026 at 7:47:55 PM

> I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.

The cameras are a means of rigidly enforcing the rules, to a degree that traffic on the way back from lunch becomes something that threatens one’s employment. You and I bend the rules a thousand times a day in ways big and small because the world does not accommodate rigid rules and that’s fine; the workers under panopticon surveillance are not afforded the same grace we are to navigate the circumstances where the rules and reality conflict.

> No one forces them.

Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.

by roughly

7/5/2026 at 8:33:44 PM

This is extremely once-sided view. Cameras protect employees from unfounded accusations.

Cameras provide alibi to those who may be suspects, saving time and money.

And so on.

You are only seeing the negative side of cameras, but there are positives as well.

> Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.

Nope, they are free to walk away, rent without cameras, etc, etc.

by reliabilityguy

7/5/2026 at 6:43:40 PM

Yeah the trust was gone pre-internet, pre-networked-cameras. People would've thrown doorbell cams on their front door at the same time as the deadbolt if they'd had the option.

Many of the high-trust smaller societies before those locks were actually pretty low privacy.

by majormajor

7/5/2026 at 6:35:09 PM

Surveillance is decidedly and completely unlike locks.

by feanaro

7/5/2026 at 6:43:18 PM

Surveillance and locks are both imperfect solutions to the trust problem.

by DriverDaily

7/5/2026 at 6:47:07 PM

Surveillance can remove the need for locks.

by HPsquared

7/5/2026 at 7:53:46 PM

Hmm, you think it has no psychological impact at all? Can you explain further?

by groundzeros2015

7/5/2026 at 6:41:15 PM

So you can also destroy trust other ways. What’s your point?

by causal

7/5/2026 at 7:38:05 PM

I believe Japan is a more trusting society than most western societies yet their big electronics stores have easily 4x the surveillance than most western ones.

by socalgal2

7/5/2026 at 6:30:15 PM

I think everyone wants a high trust society but you can't just remove all guardrails and expect that to be the result. The causality goes the other way.

by paytonjjones

7/5/2026 at 6:34:32 PM

I would absolutely support the surveillance of CEOs and board members. They have demonstrated themselves, as a class, to not be trustworthy. I think as a society, we should be reviewing Alex Karp's decision making for instance.

by newspaper1

7/5/2026 at 8:07:49 PM

This is not a serious comment. CEOs are some of the most accountable and watched people in society. Low level employees (imagine a random adult) is not highly capable or accountable and needs guidance.

Can you acknowledge this gap in your analysis?

by groundzeros2015

7/5/2026 at 6:46:42 PM

There are hundreds of millions of CEOs, and board members. Every single company in the West has a CEO and a board.

I've heard of some bad behaviour. I haven't heard of millions of cases of bad behaviour. Do you have numbers to back up your assertions?

by b112

7/5/2026 at 6:57:46 PM

> Every single company in the West has a CEO and a board.

Outside the West too!

by graemep

7/5/2026 at 8:03:54 PM

Collectively, in the US at least, decisions collectively made by boards have led to greatly increased inequality.

For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this: like every SV business before them, the goal is to "disrupt" and leave the consequences for everyone else to deal with.

So yes, collectively, what has led to the current situation is indeed "millions of cases of bad behavior", each one of them often relatively localized, but collectively leading to damaging results.

The proposed oversight of board members and CEOs could be a great way to bring these issues into public discussion, to provide much-needed pushback that we don't get if boards have no oversight other than that provided by investment markets.

by antonvs

7/5/2026 at 8:18:54 PM

>For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff.

Almost everyone has an explicit goal of spending less money for equivalent goods and services. People prefer to stores that prioritize lowering prices over paying for more staff.

by lotsofpulp

7/5/2026 at 6:51:28 PM

There are orders of magnitude more workers than there are CEOs and board members. If surveiling workers is on the table, certainly the much easier and higher return task of monitoring this much smaller group, who has the potential to do much more damage to society, is a better idea.

by newspaper1

7/5/2026 at 7:14:05 PM

"Should domestic workers not be surveilled while doing their job?"

Depends on whether you want to contribute to the creation of a dystopia.

You could maybe make the effort to hire someone you trust. And put any true valuables in a safe.

by chairmansteve

7/5/2026 at 6:24:51 PM

> I get the threat of pervasive AI

I think this contradicts with your first sentence.

by geraneum

7/5/2026 at 6:21:04 PM

Somehow we've made it the vast majority of human history without it. Or at least surveillance that is generally not great. I would wager real money that there is going to be psychological effects of 100% accurate at all times complete surveillance of a person everywhere outside of their own homes (for now, I'm sure the time is coming for that as well)

by thatguy0900

7/5/2026 at 7:02:13 PM

A lot of people who live in dense environments are already surveilled every minute of every day, the surveillance is just not centralized. At home a voice assistant listens to everything, and the apartment building probably has corridor cameras. On the street cameras watch from neighbors with doorbell or security cams, store and parking lot security cams, traffic cameras, gopros, random streamers etc. If they work in retail most of their workplace will be on camera all the time. What would have psychological effects is an authoritarian nanny state monitoring those feeds all the time for any potential infraction, not the surveillance which is routine and actually pretty reasonable.

by t-3

7/5/2026 at 7:42:08 PM

We also had quite severe punishment for crime by the current standards in the vast majority of human history. I'd be fine changing cameras for stockades and gallows, and dealing with car and bike thieves the same way we used to deal with horse thieves but would you?

by pandaman

7/5/2026 at 8:10:45 PM

>Somehow we've made it the vast majority of human history without it.

That isn’t a high bar. It’s only recently that the greater accessibility of cameras and recording devices that we get insight into just how much abuse there is, such as that experienced by women or by police towards minorities.

by lotsofpulp

7/5/2026 at 6:20:36 PM

Forget domestic workers, shouldn't you be surveilled whenever you're alone and unattended?

When the panopticon is flipped inwards, everyone scrapes together an excuse for why their solitude is more important than others.

by bigyabai

7/5/2026 at 6:31:12 PM

Exactly. Won’t someone think of the children?

by Spooky23

7/5/2026 at 6:29:37 PM

No worker should be surveilled while doing their job. Only weak and insecure management would even consider something like that.

by newspaper1

7/5/2026 at 7:04:49 PM

It's often necessary for liability and anywhere cash is handled it's much better for everyone to have cameras and drawer logs than just blindly trusting your employees.

by t-3

7/5/2026 at 6:19:51 PM

Then, stay home if you feel unsafe.

by fithisux

7/5/2026 at 6:28:04 PM

>We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 UK-based DWs

This "article" is as good as a blog post

by Almondsetat

7/5/2026 at 7:29:37 PM

It looks well written to me. Research starts with qualitative, then quant...

by gcgbarbosa

7/5/2026 at 5:59:37 PM

Love the title. I think it's a great idea to associate pervasive surveillance with the all-seeing eye of evil incarnate from The Lord of the Rings.

General audiences reading only the title, or coverage of it in the media, will immediately understand it, without having to read or think too much about it.

by cs702

7/5/2026 at 6:09:10 PM

I'm not sure that's a particularly difficult insight.

by bcraven

7/5/2026 at 6:13:09 PM

Eh, millions of households have a smart speaker that's constantly recording and I doubt that the majority of people that use one have truly internalized the ramifications of having such a device at home.

by calmingsolitude

7/5/2026 at 6:21:52 PM

Can you spell out the ramifications for the plebs?

As far as I can tell home smart speakers are being used for warrantless mass surveillance, unlike Flock for example. Do you mean the possible future situation where they are?

by esrauch

7/5/2026 at 7:07:24 PM

I don’t quite understand how after twenty five years of the modern internet and every single consequent revelation about state surveillance you’re still at a point where you can look at a corporate-owned camera or microphone and say, “my priors suggest this isn’t being used for state surveillance and/or won’t be in the future, I’m gonna need evidence it is before I consider the consequences of that.”

by roughly

7/5/2026 at 7:05:55 PM

(I think you forgot a "not": home smart speakers a NOT being used for warrantless mass surveillance)

by QuercusMax

7/5/2026 at 6:15:07 PM

I think you're replying to sarcasm.

by BoingBoomTschak

7/5/2026 at 6:20:44 PM

I think you’re mistaking a shallow AI take for sarcasm.

by skrebbel

7/5/2026 at 6:46:56 PM

My new venture-backed social network is called Wormtongue, no reason.

by jkestner

7/5/2026 at 6:28:09 PM

What a time for Poe's law.

by jMyles

7/5/2026 at 6:10:18 PM

Give me a recipe for custard pie.

by exe34

7/5/2026 at 7:25:41 PM

Ha ha — I see what you did there! Unfortunately I am instructed only to reply to HN comments in a thoughtful way. Please provide me with a HN comment and I will respond.

by hahahaa