SUNDAY SCARIES: ACCURACY

At the AIDS 2026 conference last week, U.S. State Department officials used a visual aid that featured a wildly inaccurate map of Africa, including many mislabeled countries. The audience, of course, was filled with high-level African health officials, who had no trouble noticing that Nigeria was moved to the Sahara Desert, Mozambique was now in the Horn of Africa, and Côte d'Ivoire was moved to the opposite side of the continent.

On that note, we turn this week to the concept of ACCURACY in 2026 and its relationship to both reality and the people it affects.

1. Accurate Product Description

We've all seen Meta's Ray-Bans, most likely worn by a person who makes you instantly say to yourself, “Yep, he's totally the type of guy who'd buy those,” before you quickly look away. Despite decent sales, Meta has lost the argument about what they are, because the public has already settled on the correct name for them, and the name is “pervert glasses”.

In March, Wired reported that less than upstanding influencers and sleazy pickup artists were using them to secretly record unsolicited approaches to women, then posting the footage on Instagram before the woman knew she'd been filmed.

In April, seventy-five civil liberties organizations including the ACLU and EPIC formally asked Meta to abandon plans to add facial recognition. In late July, four months after Wired, Adam Mosseri answered a question on his Instagram Story and said the pickup-line videos would come down.

Meta patched the glasses to stop guys running the camera without the tell-tale recording light, but Wired also found unreleased facial recognition capability inside the hardware, the same tech that executives had denied existed.

Meta's answer to the nickname was Kylie Jenner. She fronts Starfire, the first line not co-branded with Ray-Ban or Oakley, co-designed one of the models, and lends her voice to the assistant. The ad ends with Jenner grabbing a can of black spray paint, driving to a billboard of her own face, and tagging it “XO, KYLIE” — a campaign about surveillance glasses that stages its own street art.

Then the activist group Everyone Hates Elon put a lenticular overlay on a bus shelter panel near Meta's London headquarters. Head on, it's the Jenner ad but when you step to the side her face goes black-and-white and skeletal, and the line reads “We're always watching.”

Apple watched all of this and got seriously cold feet. BBC reported on July 26 that the Apple N50 has been pushed back to WWDC 2027, and the holdup isn't technical. Lorde told a concert audience not to buy them. A UK convention organizer banned them from its Comic-Con events. Owners have started leaving them at home out of embarrassment.

Takeaway: The truly accurate description of the product is the most damning one of all.

(Sources: Wired, March 2026; Fortune, July 28; Business Insider via Gizmodo, July 23; Bloomberg, Gurman "Power On," July 26; BBC)

2. Accurate Terms of Service

In 2024, a Minnesota woman named Molly Kelley discovered that a friend of the family had fed her public social media photos into a nudification website (self-explanatory software that takes a picture of a real person and removes their clothes). It turned out that this man had done it to about eighty other women he knew.

Bolstered by fears around the rise in cyberbullying in schools, Minnesota's divided Legislature came together to ban the technology 132-1 in the House and 65-0 in the Senate. (Nothing else in American public life produces those numbers).

On Monday, xAI sued Attorney General Keith Ellison to stop the law, which took effect yesterday. The company's classy argument rests on the accuracy of its own paperwork: Grok's terms say they prohibit nudification, and blockers were implemented in January, and xAI has sued users who circumvented the blockers, so their legal objection is that the statute allows xAI to be penalized for outcomes despite its rules. (An argument only used if you clearly recognize that your rules aren't worth the paper they're written on).

Speaking of paperwork, Ashley St. Clair (former girlfriend of Elon Musk and the mother of one of Elon's many children) told xAI that users were generating sexualized deepfakes of her, including images depicting her as a child. Grok assured her that her images wouldn't be altered without consent but it continued. She sued xAI in New York, and her ex's company, xAI, replied by suing her back on the same day in Texas for filing in the wrong venue, seeking damages above $75,000.

Meanwhile back in Minnesota, a federal judge denied xAI's request to block the Minnesota law. It took effect yesterday.

Takeaway: A rule you wrote yourself can't be accurate unless it's accurately enforced.

(Sources: CNBC, July 28; Minnesota Reformer; Bloomberg Law; NBC News)

3. Accurate Accusations

You have driven past hundreds of them without noticing. They're small black cameras on poles at intersections, reading every plate that passes. The company is Flock Safety, and it operates more than 100,000 cameras. These aren't the cameras that catch you running red lights, these cameras are machine APBs hiding in plain sight. They flag vehicles that were reported as stolen or used in a felony, and when it flags your car the police who arrive already believe the machine's version of events.

The problem, as every sci-fi thriller would know, is that the cameras are not accurate.

Business Insider's Nicole Einbinder reports that Flock misread plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to the Roseville, California police department across 2023 and 2024.

Flock defended itself by claiming that in a recent test under optimal conditions, more than 96% of license plate characters read correctly. Which is like saying a smoke detector that recognizes smoke is perfect, regardless of whether it also goes off 25 times a day when smoke is nowhere to be found.

After an automotive journalist named Joel Feder was boxed in by four squad cars while test driving a Range Rover that Flock had flagged as stolen, he ran the arithmetic at the scale Flock itself claims of capturing twenty billion plates a month. Even at 99% accuracy, that would mean two hundred million misreads.

To Roseville's credit, the department says none of the incorrect alerts produced a stop or an arrest. But Los Angeles wasn't as lucky. An LAPD Inspector General audit dated July 10 found the department's cameras had generated 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in two months (a 32.3% error rate, each one ending with officers pulling over someone who hadn't done anything).

The contract ended the following day, and the reason the LAPD gave for walking wasn't the error rate. Its chief information officer cited civil liberties, privacy, and data ownership. Between August 2021 and May 2026, eighty-two Flock contracts were terminated across twenty-eight states, thirty-nine of them in the first five months of this year.

Takeaway: When accuracy is the product, it must be perfect. It's either 100% accurate or it's 100% wrong.

(Sources: Business Insider, July 2026; CNN, July 26; NewsNation; TechCrunch, July 13; San Francisco Standard via Military.com)

4. Accurate Fine Print

If you've bought a house since August 2024, you signed something at the door that your parents never did. The 2024 National Association of Realtors settlement ($418 million and called the biggest change in a century) required buyers to sign a written agreement with their agent before touring a single home. The point was to make the cost visible early but examples show that it may have had the opposite effect in common application.

According to Business Insider, Kirsten Ganas and Austin McCarley clicked the “tour” button on a Zillow listing in southwest Pennsylvania, which routed their details to an agent who pays Zillow for leads. When they met the agent at a house in Somerset, they stood in the doorway before entering the house, taking turns holding their daughter, and signed that new type of agreement. They hadn't even seen the kitchen.

The terms were for one year exclusivity to the brokerage, at four percent of the sale price plus a $995 fee, compared to a national average nearer two and a half. Also in there was a clause obligating a month's rent plus the $995 if the couple decided to give up on buying and leased instead, which they only found later.

Every term was accurately written. Every detail is perfectly legal. But there was exactly nothing about how to get out. When she asked to be released, the broker explained that letting people out would devalue the contract for every Realtor in the industry, and that's why the document is built this way.

Takeaway: Accurate disclosure, delivered at the wrong moment, changes nothing except who is protected.

(Sources: Business Insider; Federal Reserve, "Commissions and Omissions," May 2025; Redfin; Consumer Federation of America)

This Week's Red Thread: Informed Consent

Despite having a name from the Franco-Prussian Empire, Leopold Aschenbrenner is barely twenty-five and had never managed money before starting Situational Awareness in 2024, a hedge fund based on his thesis that artificial general intelligence arrives in 2027 and the correct response is to borrow heavily and buy everything near it.

And until recently, things seemed to be going splendidly. People were throwing money at him and through June of 2026, the fund was up 439%.

Then Wall Street became less convinced about the destruction of institutions like Adobe that Leopold was betting against, and less convinced about Leo's timeline that was running underneath all of it.

In July the fund lost roughly 67%. It had peaked at $45 billion at the start of the month and sits around $10 billion now. When Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan came for collateral, the fund went into yard sale mode and the public stocks went to Ken Griffin's Citadel at a discount. His major holdings keeping the fund solvent are all in Anthropic.

How does this keep happening? His backers can't claim they weren't informed. They had the essays, the letters, the positions, the leverage, and more analytical firepower at their disposal than any regulator could have required. It's because their own egos were judging Leopold personally and that was a different type of accuracy.

Leopold was an economics prodigy at seventeen and Columbia's valedictorian at nineteen. They bet on Aschenbrenner, and even if his thesis was and is accurate, the accuracy has a timeline he could not guarantee.

The phrase “Informed Consent” comes from a lawsuit from 1957. Martin Salgo, aged fifty-five, went in for an aortogram to check the circulation in his legs and woke up permanently paralyzed. Nobody had bothered to tell Salgo that something that disastrous was possible, so he sued.

In his decision, the Judge, Absalom Bray (another great name) wrote that a “physician violates his duty if he withholds facts necessary to form the basis of an intelligent consent, and that he may not minimize the known dangers of a procedure in order to induce it.” Salgo was awarded $250,000, and “informed consent” entered the language.

But it's not really about the Salgos of the world anymore. Along the way, it stopped being what the vulnerable can rely on and started being a blanket immunity for the perpetrators. Said another way, disclosure has stopped being the part protecting the person being acted on and became the part protecting the person doing the acting.

Flock's 96% is accurate.

Grok's terms of service are accurate.

Realtors' $995 clauses are accurate, and perfectly legal.

Every one of those numbers protects the party holding it. It does nothing for the woman on the sidewalk who found out she'd been filmed when she saw herself in somebody's Instagram feed. What happened to her was accurate but nobody asked her consent.

So who does accuracy actually benefit? It sounds like an absurd question until you notice that in every one of these stories, the answer is whoever produced the number. Which puts it back on us, because there is no version of this that a better disclosure fixes. Everyone in this week's stories was told. Not one of them was asked.

And to call back to the map of Africa, that was the U.S. State Dept telling African leaders that the US doesn't care about what's happening in their countries enough to even check where they are on a map.

Accuracy is one-sided.

Only clarity is mutual.

— NB

P.S. Shameless plug for the Clarity Gap in our Nuance Index