Lauren Goode: How many cameras do you have set up at home?
Michael Calore: What? You mean like on the show Call Her Daddy? Like pointed at my couch.
Lauren Goode: No, I meant cameras for security.
Michael Calore: Like what’s my safe word?
Lauren Goode: No, the camera’s on the front of your house.
Michael Calore: Oh, I see. Like security cameras.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: No. None. I have zero security cameras in the front of my house. What about you?
Lauren Goode: I do. Well, my landlord has one.
Michael Calore: Your famous landlord.
Lauren Goode: That is for another podcast. Yeah.
Michael Calore: Well, how do you feel about the fact that your landlord has installed a camera on your house?
Lauren Goode: Well I’m not going to lie, there’ve been some strange things captured on those cameras. But it’s more like when I walk around our fine city now of San Francisco, I’ve become very aware of how much is being recorded. There are so many cameras in our neighborhood. It feels like science fiction once drafted this vision of the dystopian future of mass surveillance, but the mass surveillance was done by some big entity. And in fact, it’s just a whole bunch of consumers who got together and bought networked cameras.
Michael Calore: And the big entity is Amazon.
Lauren Goode: The big entity is Amazon.
Michael Calore: Well, we should talk about this today. People’s Ring cameras.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, it’s a thing. We should definitely talk about it.
Michael Calore: Let’s do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Lauren Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: And I’m Michael Calore, I’m WIRED’s director of consumer tech and culture.
Lauren Goode: And we’re joined this week by WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave. Paresh, welcome back to the show.
Paresh Dave: Hello. Back-to-back episodes, I think. Very exciting.
Lauren Goode: Was it?
Michael Calore: Yeah. Well, we took a week off.
Lauren Goode: We had a break week.