Xprize Founder Diamandis Joins Tech Execs Praising Global Surveillance, Ignoring Backlash

Xprize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis has publicly endorsed global surveillance, writing on X that “humans behave better when they’re being watched.” In a June 2026 Substack essay titled “Visibility, Transparency and Trust,” he described a future of “radical transparency” where “no one can hide,” calling it inevitable and beneficial. He joins Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who told analysts in September 2024 that mass recording would keep “citizens on their best behavior.”

Diamandis cited a podcast with Planet CEO Will Marshall, who noted that his company’s satellites image every square meter of Earth daily. Marshall pointed to Ukraine as proof: Planet’s imagery exposed Russia’s military buildup before the 2022 invasion, making global headlines. But the tech Diamandis celebrates is already provoking a sharp pushback from the public and policymakers.

Contract cancellations and class action lawsuits

At least 80 US cities have deactivated their Flock Safety automated licence plate reader contracts after reports that data was accessed by ICE, the FBI, and other agencies. In Dayton, Ohio, workers covered Flock cameras with trash bags after an audit found over 7,000 searches for immigration enforcement, violating city policy. Amazon’s Ring dropped its partnership with Flock in February 2026 after a Super Bowl ad for “Search Party” drew criticism that it was a mass surveillance Trojan horse.

• Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have sold seven million units. A class action lawsuit now alleges that Kenyan data workers reviewed intimate footage from users, including people having sex and using the toilet.
• Apple, Google, and Snap are developing rival camera glasses of their own.
• Facial recognition at the 2026 World Cup normalizes biometric data collection without clear sunset rules for the infrastructure.

The transparency gap in Diamandis’s argument

Diamandis frames surveillance as a tool that “only builds trust when it points both ways,” but does not address that the same companies building the infrastructure are not themselves transparent. Meta, Amazon, and Flock operate with closed algorithms and limited public oversight. Diamondis’s advice to entrepreneurs is that the “best privacy strategy is integrity,” while ignoring who defines “good behavior” when the monitoring is controlled by a handful of for-profit firms.

He wrote that “transparency is a tool, and tools don’t have ethics,” yet failed to reckon with the imbalance of power: the watchers are not watched. As cities, citizens, and courts push back against this model, the gap between Silicon Valley’s vision of radical transparency and the lived experience of those under surveillance continues to widen. The next test will come as smart glasses from Apple and Google enter mass production, bringing cameras to millions more faces without a corresponding framework for accountability.