TL;DR
Xprize founder Peter Diamandis says total surveillance makes people behave better, joining Larry Ellison in endorsing a world with no privacy.
Xprize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis has joined a growing list of tech executives who believe global surveillance is a good idea, writing on X this week that “humans behave better when they’re being watched.” In a Substack essay titled “Visibility, Transparency and Trust,” he described what he called “radical transparency” as inevitable and positive, envisioning a future “where you can know anything, anytime, anywhere” and where “no one can hide.”
Diamandis said his thinking was shaped by a podcast interview with Will Marshall, CEO of Planet, the largest operator of Earth-observing satellites. “No one can hide anymore,” Marshall told Diamandis during the conversation, citing the company’s ability to image every square metre of the planet daily. Marshall pointed to Ukraine as an example, arguing that Planet’s satellite imagery exposed Russia’s military buildup before the 2022 invasion and put it on the front page of newspapers worldwide.
The comments echo Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who told an Oracle financial analyst event in September 2024 that “citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.” Ellison predicted that AI would process footage from dashboard cameras, doorbells, and police body cameras to create a surveillance network where every officer is supervised at all times. Diamandis frames it as transparency rather than control, but the end state he describes is structurally identical.
The technology Diamandis celebrates is real and spreading. Ring doorbells, Tesla vehicles with exterior cameras, automated licence-plate readers from Flock Safety, and phone-based ad tracking already make it difficult for anyone to move through a city unrecorded. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have sold seven million pairs, putting a near-invisible camera on the faces of millions of people, and Apple, Google, and Snap are each preparing rival smart glasses with cameras of their own.
But the people on the other side of the lens are not responding the way Diamandis predicts. At least 80 US cities have cancelled or deactivated their Flock Safety camera contracts after reports that the company’s licence-plate data was being accessed by ICE, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies. In Dayton, Ohio, city workers covered Flock cameras with trash bags after an audit found more than 7,000 searches conducted for immigration enforcement purposes, a use explicitly banned under the city’s own policy.
Amazon’s Ring cancelled its partnership with Flock in February 2026 after public backlash over a Super Bowl advertisement for Ring’s “Search Party” feature, which was pitched as a tool for finding lost dogs but which critics called a Trojan horse for mass human surveillance. Meta ended its contract with Sama after Kenyan data workers reported reviewing intimate footage captured by Ray-Ban smart glasses users, including people having sex, undressing, and using the toilet, and is now facing a class action lawsuit over the glasses’ privacy practices.
Diamandis does not engage with any of this pushback. His essay is framed as advice for entrepreneurs on how to live in a world without privacy, and his guidance amounts to telling people that the “best privacy strategy is integrity, living so that being seen costs you nothing.” He does not address the question of who defines “good” or “honest” when the companies building the surveillance infrastructure are the ones making that determination.
He briefly acknowledges the risk, writing that “transparency is a tool, and tools don’t have ethics,” and that it “only builds trust when it points both ways.” But he does not reckon with the imbalance at the centre of his argument: the technology to create “radical transparency” is controlled by a small number of companies that are not themselves transparent. Facial recognition and biometric surveillance are already being normalised at events like the 2026 World Cup, where fans opt into face-based entry without clarity on how long the infrastructure persists after the tournament ends.
Diamandis says the question he has been “chewing on” is whether people behave well because it is the right thing to do or because they might be under surveillance. That he frames this as an open question, rather than the central objection to his entire argument, suggests he has not chewed on it long enough.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
