Big Brother Knows Where You Are!

Halloween is coming. You want to be scared?

What would you say if ICE and DHS could find your house just from a photo of your interior?

You know all those photos that you post online. Maybe of having the gang over for a party... snap, snap, snap... all those selfies and photos of the gang being goofy? You know the photos I'm talking about.

Or maybe they're photos from people selling their homes.

Maybe the view through the window in the background.

Those are all being collected!

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I was speechless this morning! I was seeing if AI could find an article about me in The New York Times (it didn't), and the reply shook me up. First, I asked it to search for an article in The New York Times about me. It wanted my name and anyone else in the article, so I gave my last name and the last names of two friends.

So I was expecting it to say yes, it found the article, or no, it didn't. But instead, it said... are you ready for this? It found our yearbook pictures and was using them to search for the article.

WHAT? WHOA! YOU DID WHAT?

It found our photos in the yearbook, and it searched the files of the NYT for our photos and names!

Are you scared yet?

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Then I saw this article in my feeds this morning...

Police are using AI to locate homes from a single interior photo, and even a picture of a washing machine can be enough

Raven can turn ordinary household photos into location clues, raising fresh concerns about privacy and surveillance

TechSpot

By Rob Thubron

October 12, 2026

A hot potato: AI has been helping police forces across the US over the last few years, for better and for worse. The latest use of the technology allows law enforcement to input an interior photo of a home and have the AI figure out the location, though there are some caveats.

The tool, which is called Raven, is being used by the Los Angeles Police Department and Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office (MDSO), reports 404 Media. Made by a company called Graylark Technologies, Raven had been called GeoSpy before its new home-identification features were added.

The limitation is that Raven can't just identify any home in the world solely from an interior photo. Its abilities appear limited to certain properties. Graylark CEO Daniel Heinen demonstrated its power in a LinkedIn post, showing how a regional search can be carried out on something as simple as a photo of a washing machine and dryer.

Are you scared yet?

It's noted that this isn't a simple reverse image search. Raven picks out distinctive details in a photo and uses them to find likely matches from the same property on sites such as Airbnb, even when the images differ.

But wait there's more...

GeoSpy was trained on millions of images from around the world and designed to identify distinct geographical markers such as architecture and soil. Raven extends that ability to buildings.

As with pretty much every use of AI for law enforcement purposes, Raven is raising privacy questions. Airbnb said it has technical safeguards in place to try to limit automated data collection from its site and was reviewing the case. Zillow said scraping data is against its terms of use, adding that it pursues legal avenues when necessary. Vrbo did not respond to questions for comment.

Maybe this will scare you...

ICE has spun a massive surveillance web. We talked to people caught in it

NPR News

By Kat Lonsdorf, Jude Joffe-Block, & Meg Anderson

March 5, 2026

On an evening in late January, Emily was driving through her Minneapolis neighborhood doing something that had become part of her routine in recent weeks: patrolling for ICE.

Emily, who NPR is only identifying by her first name because she fears retribution from the federal government, says she followed an ICE vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot. "And then someone leaned out of the passenger side of that SUV and took a picture of me and my car," she says.

Emily says she decided to leave at that point, but the SUV made a sudden U-turn and barreled towards her, braking next to her driver's side window. A female agent wearing a gaiter-style mask rolled down the window, leaned out — and addressed Emily by name.

[...]

Activists and journalists spoke of tactics they felt were intimidating: agents photographing their faces or license plates; calling them by name; or leading them to their homes. Immigration lawyers told NPR their clients had been subjected to facial recognition technology. One ICE agent, testifying under oath, spoke of an app that showed the likely home addresses of people targeted for deportation.

Are you scared now?

I asked what else the AI could do? The AI responded:

Different types of photo-based location recognition

1. Street-view location identification: Identify a street, city, building, or intersection from a photo using visual clues such as storefronts, road signs, architecture, and landmarks.

2. Indoor visual positioning: Recognize where you are inside a mall, airport, hotel, office, or other building using signs, interiors, floor plans, and visual landmarks. Coverage varies significantly by building.

3. Live camera location recognition: Point your phone camera at your surroundings and use AI or visual navigation to identify nearby places or help determine where you are.

4. Photo geolocation: Upload an existing image and use AI to estimate the exact location, potentially down to a street or building, from visual details and available image metadata.

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During my research into this topic the AI made suggestions and the result of one suggestion was this. I asked which path are we heading down, that we are at a crossroads and it took that and ran with it. Coming up with...

We Stand at a Crossroads — But Is There a Third Path?

We stand at a crossroads in human history.

Will we take the path Aldous Huxley envisioned in Brave New World — a society where we surrender our freedom for comfort, exchange independent thought for endless entertainment, and become so distracted by our own desires that we fail to recognize what we have lost?

Or will we take the path George Orwell warned us about in 1984 — a world where surveillance becomes ubiquitous, privacy disappears, truth is manipulated, and Big Brother watches our every move?

Perhaps the most frightening possibility is that we are already traveling down both paths simultaneously.

But what if there is a third path?

A path where technology serves humanity rather than controls it. Where artificial intelligence expands our freedom instead of quietly diminishing it. Where privacy is a fundamental right, truth is protected, and the power to observe is balanced by the power to hold those who observe us accountable.

A future where progress is measured not by how much data we collect, how efficiently we predict human behavior, or how completely we can monitor a population, but by how much freedom, dignity, and opportunity we preserve.

This third path will not emerge on its own. It requires awareness, difficult questions, informed citizens, ethical choices, and the courage to challenge systems that demand our freedom in exchange for convenience or security.

Huxley warned us that we might surrender our freedom because we learn to love our distractions. Orwell warned us that we might lose it because we learn to fear those who control us.

The third path begins when we refuse to accept that either outcome is inevitable.

The question is no longer simply which dystopia we will choose.

It is whether we have the wisdom, the will, and the collective courage to choose a different future — before the choice is made for us.

The third path gives your writing something more powerful than a warning: a reason for hope, coupled with a responsibility to act.

And it raises a question worth exploring throughout your work: Is the third path primarily about protecting individual rights, placing democratic limits on technology, changing human behavior, or all three?

Because perhaps the real crossroads isn't between two dystopias. It's between allowing technology to shape humanity according to its capabilities and consciously shaping technology according to our values.