Nilay Patel

For its part, Flock says the same thing, that it doesn't actually work with ICE, but rather local law enforcement, and it's those local agencies that work with ICE.

This is the complication that I mentioned earlier, and if you're a Decoder listener, you know where it's going.

I asked Jamie about all those databases, who owns them, and what it means to connect them all up with AI.

But when you connect a bunch of those databases, right, when you connect particularly to facial recognition, there's a turn in the privacy conversation where the stakes ratchet up really high.

Where maybe it's gone forever.

How are you thinking about that kind of decision making?

Okay, we have a lot of intelligence in the AI.

It's trivial for the AI to go connect to another store of information.

That's a thing you can do with AI, especially at a big company like Amazon where you have lots of other stores of information.

There's a line.

What's the line for you?

I'm asking this for a lot of reasons, but I look at sort of broadly what's happening with surveillance footage out in the world.

And I'm not saying Ring is participating in this.

I'm just giving you the example.

ICE has facial recognition systems, right?

And they are arguing that a positive match in their facial recognition system is a definitive determination of someone's immigration status.

That's way out there.

I don't think you're doing that.

But you can get to, OK, we have facial recognition.

We have a bunch of evidence coming off of ring cameras.