Tech got a little scary at CES 2023

Every year it seems the tech industry comes up with more fascinating gadgets to improve our lives, from color-changing cars to smart sprinklers that turn on automatically when they sense the garden is getting too dry. But there are times when we wonder: just because the tech industry can do all these awesome things, right?

This year’s CES included some products that, at first glance, seem more scary than cool. Like a exercise bike integrated into a desk to power your computer or a device that covers your mouth in the real world while you’re chatting on a conference call or playing a game. Perhaps most of the eyebrow raisers were a sensor for your toilet bowl, designed to analyze your pee. And while the ever-increasing push of cameras into our lives potentially means more nonsense as people live-stream their own Great British Bake Off-style moments from their ovens, there’s the very real question of how many cameras connected to the Internet are too many and which companies we can trust to access them.

In each case, these products might have good reason to exist, but we have to wonder if they might also help usher in the dystopian future we’ve been warned about in science fiction over the decades.

“We saw so many things that were science fiction in the 80s and 90s that became science fact,” said Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose presence at this year’s CES has unwittingly caused people to become increasingly concerned. about technology spiraling out of control. Schwarzenegger, after all, starred as the murderous villain and hero of the T-800 robots in the Terminator film franchise. “In most of my films, the machines were an enemy,” he told the show’s audience without the slightest irony.

He said, however, that companies seem to be learning from his various roles in Hollywood, “that for technology to really work, it has to work with humans, not against us.”

Here are a few products that blur that line, no matter how well-meaning their inventors are.

In the name of protecting your conversations

Balancing work and family life has been one of the biggest struggles of the pandemic. Whether it’s kids with cabin fever interrupting work or dueling conference calls between spouses working in the same free room in the house, we’ve all had those moments when Get Smart’s cone of silence would have been welcome. It’s there that Shiftall’s Mutalk thinks it can help.

The device looks like a weird technical version of a gag, but it’s actually meant to help you speak more easily in virtual and professional worlds that you can interact with. It calls itself a “soundproof Bluetooth microphone that prevents others from hearing your voice and at the same time prevents ambient noise from entering the microphone”.

french startup Skyte created a similar sound-absorbing mask to provide call privacy in crowded and noisy places. It’s more like a bulky version of the reusable masks we’ve all grown accustomed to during the pandemic, but Skyted says it absorbs 80% of vocal vibrations and instead directs them via a wireless Bluetooth connection to our phones or computers.

“My original concept was from a transport perspective, as I was focused on how we could block the human voice from traveling to keep calls private, quiet and confidential,” Skyted CEO Stephane Hersen said in a statement when announcing his device. “We have all experienced calls in very noisy situations, with a high potential for privacy breaches and frequent sonic assaults on those around us, not to mention concurrent conference calls even within our own homes.”

You work harder for the job

There is a moment in Netflix’s dystopian sci-fi TV show Black Mirror where the episode’s protagonists are forced to use stationary bikes that generate electricity in exchange for “merits”, which they use to pay for their daily needs.

That’s probably not the idea Acer’s designers hoped to conjure up when they created the eKinekt BD 3, a stationary bike fused to a desk. As users pedal, their energy is routed to a battery. Acer said it envisions the product as a way to “support sustainable and healthier lifestyles”, and perhaps in a nod to fears people might have, the company said the battery of the device can charge your devices whether you are pedaling or not.

I’m giving the product a point for trying to create a more durable working setup, but I’m going to subtract a point for inadvertently reviving Black Mirror. 15 million merits episode.

Very personal sensors

There are millions of people today who have to urinate into test cups or use test strips to track their nutrition, kidney function, and menstrual cycles. But Withings thinks a sensor attached to a toilet bowl can help simplify all that, using a cartridge to detect and then transmit the results to an app.

“You don’t think about it and you just do what you do every day,” Withings CEO Mathieu Letombe told CNET.

Of course, its mere existence raises broader questions about our personal data and the trust we place in tech companies to protect it. Proponents warn, for example, that the digital leads of abortion seekers could be used as criminal evidence in states where abortion is prosecuted.

Three months after the The United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. wade, stripping bodily rights guaranteed to women in the United States for nearly 50 years, Apple executives have gone a step further by reminding people that health data and cycle tracking done through the Apple Watch and the iPhone are “encrypted on your device and accessible only with your passcode, Touch ID or Face ID.” Data is further protected between devices and backups, and “Apple does not have the key to decrypt the data and cannot read it”, Sumbul DesaiApple’s vice president of health, said then.

For its part, Withings indicates on its site that as a French company, it is subject to European Union regulations “which guarantee you a high level of protection of your personal data”, although it also recognizes that it must follow a “compulsory disclosure” to “certain authorities” when it is required by law. Withings also indicates that if you delete your account, the information cannot be extracted from its systems after seven days.

Big tech is watching

This is less about what the product is than about who made it. There are already many connected technologies dashcams on the market, but what makes Ring’s $250 Car Cam most appealing is that it’s designed to work with Ring’s broader application and service. That may be a boon for fans of the company’s products, but it’s not quite as guaranteed a win for those who have followed Ring’s close relationship with law enforcement and its announcement last year that ‘he reserves the right to share any video footage with the government in “emergency situations” regardless of the user’s consent or if there is a warrant.

Ring’s Car Cam is actually two cameras, one pointing towards the street and the other pointing inwards towards the passengers. Ring said it built a physical shutter on the side of the device facing the car. If someone closes this shutter, it also turns off the microphones, although the outward-facing camera continues to record. “One of the best things about privacy is that it’s manual — it’s physical,” Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff said. in an interview with CNET’s Justin Eastzer.