In this discussion on Redacted, we look at how centralized, cloud-dependent AI on smartphones becomes a tool for surveillance. Features like Apple’s Enhanced Visual Search analyze user photos at scale, often enabled by default, without consent and tied into opaque data pipelines users don’t meaningfully control.

This isn’t a critique of AI as a technology — it’s a critique of who runs it and where it lives. When AI operates inside big-tech ecosystems, tied to identity, cloud services, and data collection, it becomes technocratic infrastructure.

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