Xprize founder says ‘humans behave better when they’re being watched’

Xprize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis has joined a growing list of tech executives who think that global surveillance is a good idea, saying, “[h]umans behave better when they’re being watched.”

Diamandis shared his opinion in a post on X this week, and went much deeper on his beliefs on his Substack, where he described, essentially: Big Brother, but good.

“Radical transparency is coming. A future where you can know anything, anytime, anywhere. A future where no one can hide,” he wrote on Substack. “We are wrapping the planet in an ‘Sensor Ecosystem’: a living, multi-layered sensing system that runs from the cameras in your home, to the phone in your pocket, to autonomous cars and humanoid robots on the ground, to drones and flying cars in the air, all the way up to a constellation of satellites imaging every square meter on the Earth every single day.”

Diamandis’ comments come roughly two years after Oracle founder Larry Ellison said something very similar.

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Ellison predicted during an Oracle event in 2024.

Diamandis appears to have been spurred to make such claims after hosting a podcast interview with Will Marshall, the CEO of Planet, the largest operator of Earth-observing satellites.

“No one can hide anymore,” Marshall told Diamandis during the conversation. “If you build a school, we’re going to see the school. If you build a data center, we’re going to see the data center. And the accountability is going to be there for the whole world to see, no matter what.”

Diamandis, Ellison, and Marshall are not wrong that much of this tech is here and spreading. It’s becoming increasingly hard for people to make it through their day without being photographed by home security systems like Ring, camera-laden cars like Tesla makes, or automated license plate readers from Flock. Even if they can, they are surveilled through their phones by ad networks and data brokers.

But Diamandis’ comments are some of the most blunt about seeking to eradicate privacy.

“Your kids will grow up in a world with no ‘off the record’,” he writes to any parents reading his post. “Teach them that the best privacy strategy is integrity, living so that being seen costs you nothing. And fight, hard, for a world where the watching goes both ways.”

Diamandis seems to treat this as an inevitability, but that’s not how everyday people are responding to the rise of surveillance tech. Some cities have covered their Flock cameras with trash bags after reports that the company’s data was being accessed by ICE, the FBI, and other law enforcement. Public pushback on Ring’s “Search Party” feature — aimed at finding lost dogs, an idea that is typically hard to argue against — contributed to the company canceling its own partnership with Flock.

Meta, meanwhile, has been dealing with complaints about its camera glasses (made in partnership with Ray-Ban), and is also fighting a lawsuit over privacy concerns.

Much of Diamandis’ Substack post is framed around giving advice to entrepreneurs or executives on how to live in a world with no privacy. This advice mostly boils down to: “be a good person.” And even he doesn’t have an answer for the question of whether people would do this because it’s the right thing to do, or because they might be under surveillance. (He writes that it’s the question he’s “been chewing on” since concluding the interview with Marshall.)

What Diamandis doesn’t wrestle with is the same set of questions that tech executives often elide in conversations about surveillance and privacy. The definitions of “good” or “honest” are, unfortunately, often in the eye of the beholder — in this case, powerful tech companies that control the surveillance infrastructure.

Diamandis briefly argues that these companies are offering transparency, and that “transparency is a tool, and tools don’t have ethics.” He doesn’t reckon with the fact that tools often inherit the biases of their creators. Who decides what behavior captured by a security camera is “good” or “honest”? This question isn’t explored, let alone answered.

All he’s willing to say is that transparency “only builds trust when it points both ways.” That balance seems tricky, at best, in a world where the technology to create such “transparency” is controlled by so few.

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