Privacy Protector @TED: When Malala Met The Drones

The TED conference is a wondrous thing — kind of brain and sensory summer camp for adults, albeit gray rainy summer camp in April in Vancouver, Canada. And of course purposefully provocative. However, “ideas worth spreading” doesn’t mean ideas you can’t push back on, or ideas that don’t need some reconsidering. For someone intensely concerned about privacy and security, especially for vulnerable communities, last night’s opening session was a lot to sit with.

Here’s what happened, in sequence. It may have fully not occurred to anyone that the order mattered. Which is, in its own way, an interesting question.

First, Malala. She spoke about what the Taliban has done systematically to girls and women in Afghanistan — the surveillance, the control, the erasure from public life. Enforced with technology. Enforced with fear. The room was moved. Rightly so.

Then, two talks about drones. How extraordinary the technology is. How fast it’s advancing. How much potential it holds. One of those drone talks was from the CEO of Flock Safety — a company that makes AI-powered license plate readers, surveillance cameras, and drones integrated with that same AI. He was charming and confident. He told us that concerns about this technology basically amount to being pro-crime — which, when I looked him up last night, he had in fact done quite literally, in an email to his law enforcement clients calling critics people who want to “normalize lawlessness” and “weaken public safety.” So not an offhand remark. A strategy.

I want to stop there for a second. The people I know who are most concerned about crime are the ones most exposed to it every single day — in their neighborhoods, in their bodies, in their communities. The “pro-crime” framing is a rhetorical trap, and a fairly insulting one.

Here’s what he didn’t mention: turnabout is not fair play. Try to use this same technology to observe the police — or to deliver reproductive healthcare medication by drone to a patient in a state where the clinic is three states away — and suddenly the rules are very different. The infrastructure of watching was built by and for power. Access flows accordingly. Those aren’t edge cases or hypotheticals. They are live questions right now, for real people, with real consequences.

What the Flock CEO also did, with great confidence, was raise and then swiftly dismiss key concerns — while conspicuously leaving out what happens to plate reader data when an administration decides immigrants are criminals - the actual case today. Or what it means for a woman driving across state lines for reproductive healthcare. Or who exactly gets to define “crime.”

This isn’t a criticism of TED — the format isn’t set up for the back-and-forth these collisions deserve. But being on that stage is an enormous seal of approval. Credibility conferred on ideas that haven’t been fully stress-tested carries its own kind of weight.

So here’s what I kept thinking about, sitting in that room:

The Taliban has drones. Not hypothetically. This year, a Taliban drone came down near a girls’ school in Pakistan and injured a student. The technology does not stay with whoever invented it, or whoever intended it for good. It never has.

And I sat there wondering — would Flock, or a company that acquires it as these companies do, sign a “crime reduction” contract with the Taliban? And what would Malala have to say about that?

That question couldn’t get asked Monday night. This is me asking it now.

Who gets to be invisible? And who decides?

This is the work privacyprotector.org exists to do. More soon — and we want to hear what you’re thinking, whether you were in Vancouver or not.