You rehearse your performance review with an avatar — who keeps the recording?

Synthesia's Roleplay Sessions sounds like a pleasant idea: you rehearse your sales pitch, your performance review, your customer complaint against an AI avatar, which talks back, pushes back, and scores you against a customized rubric. CEO Victor Riparbelli's line — "we learn the best by actually practicing something rather than just reading it" — I don't dispute. What I do question: early customers include one of Europe's top three companies by market cap, a Fortune 100 firm and a major global recruiter. So this rehearsal mostly happens on a stage your employer chose.[1]

My skepticism is an occupational deformation, I know. But whoever scores a performance-review rehearsal is also keeping a record of that scoring — and the reporting never says how long it's retained or whether it's shared with the employer. Does a rehearsal an employee "failed" land on a manager's desk before the real review happens? I ask because if I don't, no one will.[1]

Samsung's glasses: the recording isn't bounded by the wearer's consent alone

Samsung unveiled its first Gemini-powered smart glasses at Galaxy Unpacked: a Sony camera sensor, gesture controls, the ability to read a whiteboard into notes, all processed on a paired phone. An open challenge to Meta's 76% market share. But what stops me here isn't the spec sheet: this device records the people in front of the wearer more than it records the wearer — and those people never saw a consent screen.[2]

The "where does the exhaust data go" question has to be asked quite literally this time: the recording lands on the phone, and where it goes from the phone isn't disclosed. Samsung hasn't even given a price or release date yet; this is the moment a product is most exciting and least accountable — the marketing is talking, the data policy isn't yet.[2]

The exhaust pipe is still sitting in the same place

On July 21 I wrote that Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement closed one exhaust pipe but not the pipe itself. On the 22nd I said Substack's percentage and Deezer's half solved the same source-tracing problem in the currency of money, not in an actual answer. Both stories I'm reading today show the same pipe from a different end: one is a recording that watches your performance at work, the other a recording that watches whoever's around you on the street.[1], [2], [4], [3]

My next test: when Samsung discloses pricing and its data policy, we'll see how much of the camera footage stays on-device and how much goes to the cloud — that will be the first concrete answer to whose server, not whose pocket, the exhaust data lands on this time.[2]