Will a new law change the internet forever?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Interface – "Will a new law change the internet forever?" (BBC, March 12, 2026)

Overview

In this episode of "The Interface," hosts Thomas Germain, Karen Hao, and Nicky Woolf unpack a set of groundbreaking new tech laws—especially the Kids Act—that could fundamentally transform the internet’s structure and culture. The team debates the impact of mandatory age verification, privacy risks, and the hidden human labour underpinning moderation and AI. They also explore surprising cultural and technological shifts, from the real-world fallout of smart devices to the resurgence of wired headphones.

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Section 1: Grim Update – AI in Military Contexts

[02:04–03:44]

• Karen Hao revisits last week's report about Anthropic's AI (Claude) being used in a military operation to bomb Iran.
  • Latest reporting shows Claude analyzed intelligence data and helped identify around 1,000 bomb targets, including a school. The school was bombed twice, leading to severe civilian casualties (many under 12).
  • "Large language models are highly inaccurate and they’re very ill equipped to be integrated into highly sensitive contexts, certainly life and death situations..." – Karen Hao [02:44]
• Pentagon declined to clarify whether the school was targeted by AI, deepening concerns about the limits and dangers of using AI in warfare.

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Section 2: The Kids Act & Age Verification – Could This Change the Internet for Good?

[04:06–13:32]

Description and Debate

• Nicky Woolf explains the Kids Act is progressing through US Congress:
  • It would mandate robust age verification (government photo ID or facial recognition) for sites with “adult content,” fundamentally ending online anonymity.
  • "On the one hand, yes, unarguably, we want to protect children...On the other hand...it provides the infrastructure for a very restrictive and very surveillance state way of operating the Internet." – Nicky Woolf [04:51]
• Thomas Germain discusses legal nuances:
  • Existing laws (e.g. porn site regulations) already require strong age checks, but expanding to the wider internet could be unconstitutional or have major unintended consequences.
  • "There's a balance here. We're trying to protect kids, but then at what cost to your comfort using the Internet?" – Thomas Germain [05:58]

Day-to-day Impacts and Risks

• Nicky: In the worst case, governments could designate any site as “unsafe”—from WikiLeaks to the NY Times—requiring full identification to access.
  • "It provides the infrastructure for a very restrictive and very surveillance state way of operating the Internet." [07:30]
• Thomas: Beyond privacy, real-world identity requirements can stifle online speech:
  • "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 with doing online." [07:52]
• Nicky: There are no proven, safe technological solutions for mass age verification; existing examples (like the Discord data breach of 70,000 government IDs) show the risks. [09:04]

The Porn Industry as the Bellwether

• All hosts: The adult industry has long been the “canary in the coal mine,” showing where tech, privacy, and regulation intersect first.
  • "Whatever the future of tech is, it happens in porn first." – Thomas Germain [09:13]
• Attempts to protect children sometimes push users to less-moderated, riskier sites.

Tech Industry Positioning and Device-based Verification

• Tech firms are divided:
  • Meta (Facebook/Instagram) supports age verification but wants device operating systems to handle it, pushing responsibility away from their platforms. [10:56]
• Device-based verification could mitigate widespread data sharing but raises new privacy concerns and hasn’t proven effective.

Parental Controls vs. Government Intervention

• Karen Hao: Parental controls aren’t perfect, especially for marginalized teens whose parents monitor or restrict their access to critical health information.
  • "This has been a perennial problem in society: Who do we trust to take care of our children?" [13:32]

Example of Restrictive Laws

• Thomas Germain: Kansas passed a law requiring age checks for "every possible sex act… and gay stuff, too."
  • Laws often explicitly target LGBTQ+ and trans communities. [14:32]
• Nicky Woolf: Once identification and surveillance infrastructure is built, it's nearly impossible to roll it back.
  • "Once you’ve built an ID, facial recognition surveillance state, it’s really hard to roll that back." [17:01]

Notable Quote:

• "The Internet had a sense of freedom and fun and hope. Now, maybe that was naïve, but…it seems to me that the damage that's been done to the Internet has been done by the corporatization of it." – Nicky Woolf [15:50]

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Section 3: Hidden Human Labour – Who's Watching Your Smart Glasses?

[19:14–29:35]

Investigative Report on Meta Ray-Bans

• Recent investigation by Swedish journalists uncovered that millions of recordings from Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses (some highly intimate or sexual) end up reviewed by third-party contractors in Kenya, not always with users’ knowledge or consent.
  • "Your sex video can end up in an office in Kenya." – Karen Hao [19:14]
• Meta’s public-facing privacy claims (“Designed for privacy, controlled by you”) are contradicted by tiny print in their AI terms of service—users are rarely aware of the human review process.

The Global Shadow Workforce

• Karen Hao: The entire internet—moderation, cleaner AI models, and the data that powers them—is built on large networks of low-paid human labor in the Global South.
  • "There is this huge supply chain of data, intimate videos being sent to these people for review..." [19:55]
  • "Literally everything that you possibly use probably has hidden human labor behind it." [24:27]

Annotation, Moderation, and AI

• Human workers not only moderate content but actively teach and correct AI, often being exposed to profoundly disturbing material.
  • "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." [27:49]
• Mental health support for these workers is minimal or nonexistent.
  • "There isn't like a psychologist you could talk to if you see something that gives you PTSD…just the human gears in this giant machine we never see." – Thomas Germain [27:53]

Workers’ Growing Agency

• Workers are organizing and speaking out, making these hidden systems visible.
  • "[Workers] are actively organizing now to get their story out, to make international headlines…reclaiming visibility into the hidden pipes of the digital infrastructure." – Karen Hao [29:07]

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Section 4: Wired Headphones Strike Back – Tech Fatigue, Culture, and Conspiracies

[29:35–38:48]

Wired Headphones Go Viral (Again)

• Nicky Woolf: “I have wired headphones and always have. Always. I have never owned a pair of Bluetooth headphones.” [29:47]
• Apple’s removal of the headphone jack in 2016 was controversial; AirPods were initially mocked, then boomed.
• Sales of wired headphones are now surging after five years of decline—driven partly by perceived sound quality, but also anti-corporate sentiment and fashion.

Sound Quality & Convenience

• Wired headphones usually offer better audio quality for the same price as Bluetooth.
  • “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…” – Thomas Germain [33:13]

The “Anti-Tech” and Fashion Trends

• Nicky: Many are rejecting business practices that lock them into constant upgrades and obsolescence. Younger people opt to “simplify their lives down.” [34:21]
• Paparazzi photos highlight the resurgence: “All of the, like coolest people in Hollywood and like sports stars…have started switching back to wired headphones.” – Thomas Germain [34:57]

Wired vs. Wireless Conspiracy Theories

• Karen Hao: Part of the trend ties into privacy—Bluetooth isn’t 100% secure, and some fear hacking.
  • Nicky clarifies that these concerns, along with myths of “Bluetooth frying your brain,” are not evidence-based but have deep roots in tech conspiracy culture.
  • “This was a conspiracy theory about radio when radio first came in. There is no evidence whatsoever that Bluetooth or WiFi or 5G is…doing anything of the sort.” – Nicky Woolf [37:20]
• The hosts remind listeners that most online claims are weighted equally, regardless of credibility—a “catastrophic problem.”

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Section 5: Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Once you’ve built an id, facial recognition surveillance state, it’s really hard to roll that back.” – Nicky Woolf [17:01]
• “Whatever the future of tech is, it happens in porn first.” – Thomas Germain [09:13]
• “Literally everything that you possibly use probably has hidden human labor behind it.” – Karen Hao [24:27]
• “The Internet had a sense of freedom and fun and hope. Now, maybe that was naïve…” – Nicky Woolf [15:50]
• “Your sex video can end up in an office in Kenya.” – Karen Hao [19:14]
• “If you're worried about the sound quality or if you just want to be cool…maybe, you know, give the wires a try, it's actually kind of nice. And you could be like, Nikki. Everybody likes Nikki.” – Thomas Germain [38:48]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:04 – AI used in military operations
• 04:06 – The Kids Act and age verification debate
• 07:13 – How day-to-day internet use would change
• 09:04 – Discord data breach and privacy risks
• 13:32 – Parental controls and LGBTQ+ concerns
• 14:32 – Laws targeting queer/trans content
• 19:14 – The exposé on Meta Ray-Bans and hidden human labor
• 24:27 – Humans as the backbone of content moderation and AI
• 29:35 – The wired headphones trend and its cultural context
• 34:21 – Tech pushback and generational divides
• 37:20 – Conspiracy theories about Bluetooth and wireless tech

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Conclusion

The episode captures a moment where technology, law, and culture are shifting rapidly—with enormous implications. Whether it’s ID-based age verification, algorithmic “gatekeepers,” privacy scandals, or the gadgets we wear, the hosts keep the tone irreverent but critical, urging listeners to see beneath the surface of their everyday tech.

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For further discussion, contact The Interface by email ([e-mail]) or on social media as listed in the show notes.

Transcript

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[Thomas Germain]

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[Karen Howe]

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

[Thomas Germain]

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

[Nicky Wolf]

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

[Thomas Germain]

Hello, and welcome to the Interface, the show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Thomas Germain.

[Karen Howe]

I'm Karen Howe.

[Nicky Wolf]

And I'm Nicky Wolf. Today on the Interface, the proposed new law that could end the Internet as

[Karen Howe]

we know it, the hidden human labor that's watching you.

[Thomas Germain]

And are wired headphones actually better than Bluetooth?

[Karen Howe]

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 Anthropic's 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 contexts, 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 AI model. And they declined to share any further information.

[Nicky Wolf]

It's all just a grim story all around.

[Karen Howe]

It is very grim. With that, I think we have a really great show for you today. We're going to talk about some hopefully more fun topics and horrible stuff is

[Thomas Germain]

a little less horrible.

[Nicky Wolf]

Yeah, it's not bad.

[Thomas Germain]

It's not that bad, but it's bad.

[Karen Howe]

So, Nikki, why don't you take it away?

[Nicky Wolf]

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, K I D S. Congress likes to use these cutesy little acronyms for all of this 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 will need 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 has really split public opinion straight down the middle because on the one hand, yes, unarguably, 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 US that you might not want the government to have that kind of information about you or private companies to have that information about you. So 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.

[Thomas Germain]

There's some important nuance here, right? So there's this question of age verification. If you live in half of US 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 aren't 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?

[Karen Howe]

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.

[Nicky Wolf]

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

[Karen Howe]

the Epstein files or the New York

[Thomas Germain]

Times or the BBC, right.

[Nicky Wolf]

Access to information about abortion provisions in southern states where abortion is under assault by the state governments 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.

[Thomas Germain]

Right now you know you're constantly being monitored, everyone knows that. But what if there was this 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? 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 with doing online.

[Nicky Wolf]

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.

[Thomas Germain]

Like it's like a chat app for gamers.

[Nicky Wolf]

70,000 people's identification was leaked and this

[Karen Howe]

was like their government id.

[Nicky Wolf]

Yeah.

[Karen Howe]

Oh, wow.

[Thomas Germain]

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, you know, where like the biggest economic engine is in the world.

[Karen Howe]

That's how the Internet is made.

[Nicky Wolf]

Right. Porn is always the canary in the coal mine.

[Thomas Germain]

Exactly.

[Nicky Wolf]

Anything in terms of privacy and surveillance and technology, it always happens in porn first.

[Thomas Germain]

Everyone can agree that we don't want children accessing pornography, right? Like if you talk to pornhub and the company that owns pornhub 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.

[Nicky Wolf]

This new legislation updates another piece of legislation which has been going through called cosa, the Kids Online 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.

[Karen Howe]

Do we know who. Which of the tech companies has been doing the lobbying?

[Thomas Germain]

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. Wait, they should have to check your id because that way it's like the responsibility to protect kids is like no longer in Meta's hands.

[Karen Howe]

What Would it look like for the operating systems of your devices to be doing this? Like, is that supposed to be better?

[Thomas Germain]

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, where it's 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 careen 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?

[Karen Howe]

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 control is. Is also not the perfect solution. Like, I was talking with some LGBTQ teens who were saying that, you know, having Parents who do not support the fact that they are gay, and then using parental controls to surveil and control their access to health information was, in and of 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 of, like, who do we trust to take care of our children?

[Thomas Germain]

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, cosa, 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.

[Nicky Wolf]

And at exactly that same time, Kansas has passed a law saying that trans people must change their IDs to the sex assigned at birth. It is. Right.

[Thomas Germain]

And then the driver's licenses were invalidated, like, overnight with no warning. Right?

[Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Thomas Germain]

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 you'd be a healthier, more adjusted person?

[Nicky Wolf]

Christ, no. I mean, look, we grew up in. Suddenly, I grew up in the age of a basically completely free Internet. It was an absolute free for all. 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 Meta, making their platform so neurologically addictive occasionally, when I was a teenager, catching a gif of, like, naked people doesn't come close to the kind of harm that we're talking about.

[Thomas Germain]

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.

[Karen Howe]

It's basically like, are we okay with the current status quo? I guess. Yeah, maybe the question then is like what are the harms that we're seeing currently that are not being addressed?

[Nicky Wolf]

And they're very nebulous. Right? This is not a law proposed because of anything suddenly that has come up, any sudden new 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, facial recognition, surveillance state, it's really hard to roll that back.

[Karen Howe]

Well, if this story didn't get you really concerned about your privacy, then my story definitely will

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[Karen Howe]

There was a recent investigation that was done by two Swedish newspapers, SVD and GP as well as a freelancer in Kenya, Nepa Noi Le Papa. And this is the craziest investigation because they basically discover that if you are a meta Ray Bans user, people are watching the recordings that you are making and there is no way for you to Opt out.

[Nicky Wolf]

These are smart glasses, right? We're talking about glasses. With a little camera, a little computer, you can record stuff. You see, One of the immediate problems with them came up with people recording people in public without their consent.

[Karen Howe]

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, you know, a man put his Meta Ray Bans on the bedside table and then left the room, but it 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 Ray Bans 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, you know, there is this huge supply chain of. 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. 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, really, this is like, this is partly a crazy situation because of the way that Meta advertises its glasses. So it has this page dedicated to privacy of their Meta Ray Bans products. And at the top of this page, it says in big, bold letters, designed for privacy controlled by you.

[Advertiser]

Oh, good.

[Thomas Germain]

Oh, well, what are we even talking about then? That's right.

[Nicky Wolf]

Neither of those things. That every word in that sentence is a lie.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah. So this is what, like, Meta's defense has been in response to this investigation is.

[Thomas Germain]

Oh.

[Karen Howe]

But in our AI terms of service, which is a totally different page, there's this like, 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 prints, it's like, maybe don't share sensitive data that you don't want shared to us.

[Thomas Germain]

Well, I think, you know, the good news here is that almost everyone reads all the privacy policies, so you'd probably know 100%. 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?

[Karen Howe]

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 back end 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 it's 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 reviewing is sort of similar to what we're seeing with this meta Ray Bans. 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 ChatGPT can chat is because there's literally tens or hundreds of thousands of people around the world that are typing into OpenAI's large language model and showing it. This is the correct answer. This is a not so great answer. And then there's there's my, my all time favorite category of human labor is artificial artificial intelligence.

[Thomas Germain]

Right.

[Karen Howe]

Which we'll, we'll definitely get to at some point in a later episode. But suffice to say, you think that, 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 potty photos were literally going onto Facebook and then like traveling to then public spaces because then they would leak from the Facebook group.

[Thomas Germain]

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, oh, 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?

[Karen Howe]

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 visa privacy laws and in Europe and in California, and that they operate under rigorously audited policies and procedures designed to protect all customer information.

[Nicky Wolf]

Well, I feel better. I don't know about everyone else.

[Thomas Germain]

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.

[Karen Howe]

Sam 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 Perrigo 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.

[Nicky Wolf]

Yikes.

[Karen Howe]

And these workers were just getting like totally traumatized.

[Thomas Germain]

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 perch thousands of miles away.

[Karen Howe]

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 asked 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. 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.

[Thomas Germain]

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?

[Nicky Wolf]

I have wired headphones and always have. Always. I have never owned a pair of Bluetooth headphones.

[Thomas Germain]

Wait, you've never. You've never owned Bluetooth headphones ever?

[Nicky Wolf]

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.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah, as much as every time I talk to Nikki, I feel like I'm dealing with, like, one of these unfrozen cavemen. It seems like he is actually on trend here. So I'm.

[Nicky Wolf]

I'm cool now.

[Karen Howe]

You're so out of date that you've gone.

[Thomas Germain]

You're so out of date that it's come 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.

[Karen Howe]

Oh, my God. I remember actually being so outraged about that.

[Thomas Germain]

I was outrageous at the time. I was like, this is the worst day of my life. And the same year, at that same, you know, conference, they announced the AirPods are new, like, totally wireless Bluetooth headset. And at first, people lost their minds about this, right? Like, people were. People hated the AirPods. They were making fun of them. They're too expensive. People said they look like tampons without strings, or like the head of a electric toothbrush or something. People hated them. But they started to catch on.

[Nicky Wolf]

They didn't catch on. They were forced upon us.

[Thomas Germain]

But they were forced.

[Nicky Wolf]

But people liked them.

[Thomas Germain]

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 Circana. They said that, like, wired headphones, that sales have been declining every year, five years straight without a break, right? Down and down and down and down, 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.

[Karen Howe]

Okay, this is a bit of a revelation for me because I also have insane behaviors around headphones, so I was actually gonna use my. I have AirPods, and I was gonna use them for this episode so that we could fight about it, but then I forgot to charge them. So Nikki gets a point for that.

[Nicky Wolf]

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. There you go.

[Karen Howe]

But I never, never pay for wired headphones. I take them from my flights. Ah. It's like every time I go on a flight, they give them to you.

[Thomas Germain]

Well, those don't sound better than AirPods, right?

[Karen Howe]

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

[Thomas Germain]

Right?

[Karen Howe]

It turns out it's because I'm.

[Thomas Germain]

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 $1,000 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 is 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?

[Nicky Wolf]

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.

[Thomas Germain]

The sound quality being improved. I get that. Right. The anti tech backlash where it's like, I'm just going back, I'm going back to something 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, like coolest people in Hollywood and like sports stars, everyone has started switching back to wired headphones. And you're seeing if you like look at paparazzi photos of like Charlie XCX and Ariana Grande and like, you know, guys from the NBA. More and more you're seeing these wired, like the white, like porcelain white apple earbuds dangling from their ears, which used to be. Right. Like if you were still using wired headphones a couple of years ago, like you're an old person.

[Karen Howe]

That's so interesting.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah.

[Karen Howe]

I mean, 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.

[Thomas Germain]

Well, I don't really buy that.

[Nicky Wolf]

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 they can get hacked. They can get 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.

[Karen Howe]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Thomas Germain]

But there's another thing, right? Like, there's this huge. I mean, Nikki, I'm sure you've seen. This is like, this conspiracy stuff about how Bluetooth is gonna fry your brain, and it's like, giving us all cancer or something. Have you guys heard about this?

[Karen Howe]

I had no idea that this was a thing. Is my brain being fired?

[Nicky Wolf]

Okay, so every single time there was a new kind of wireless technology. We saw it with wifi, 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 came in. Right. There is no evidence whatsoever that Bluetooth or wi fi or 5G is in any meaningful way doing anything of the sort.

[Thomas Germain]

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 there's some massive conspiracy going on here.

[Nicky Wolf]

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 so old, it's built into the literal language of conspiracy theories.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah. It goes right back to the beginning.

[Nicky Wolf]

Yeah. This speaks to a wider and, I think, catastrophic problem of the way that our Internet now gives us information. Information is that every single thing that passes by our eyeballs has exactly the same weight as every other thing. Right. Could be that 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.

[Thomas Germain]

I personally, I can tell you I am not worried. I 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, you know, the young people and be up on the latest trend, maybe, you know, give the wires a try, it's actually kind of nice. And you could be like, Nikki. Everybody likes Nikki.

[Nicky Wolf]

And I'm cool, right?

[Thomas Germain]

That's what I'm talking about.

[Nicky Wolf]

One of the cool kids now.

[Thomas Germain]

Yeah. And that's our show. You can listen to the interface on bb, BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts, or watch us on YouTube on the BBC podcast channel. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email us@the interfacebc.com or you can find us on WhatsApp. Send us a message at 443-332-072472. 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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[Thomas Germain]

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