Tech
Want This Hearing Aid? Well, Who Do You Know?
“I’ve tried different brands of hearing aids, and they’re good, but they’re not this good,” says Martin in a Zoom interview. He visited the team in Soho, did the street test, and was delighted when he tried it with his wife and daughter at their favorite restaurant, with de Jonge sitting with the laptop several tables away. But the clincher for Martin was a cocktail party.
“I was here in our building, and I was at a party upstairs, and I had my old hearing aids in,” he says. “I’m sitting talking to four people, and I realized I can’t understand any of them, and I go, wait, I have these new hearing aids. I went downstairs, put them in, came back, and I could hear everyone.” Now he wears them all the time, and even made a joke about hearing aids on Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special. “I don’t really think about the way it used to be,” he says. “I used to dread going to a restaurant, and now I don’t.” His friend Balaban, once he got into the beta test, is similarly smitten. “This is a significant improvement over the absurdly pricey devices I’d been using,” Balaban says.
Other machers aren’t public, but de Jonge assures me they are mostly names invoked in boldface type. Since there are only a few dozen beta units, this means that some powerful people have been shuttled to a waiting list. Balaban’s wife, Lynn Grossman, recounts attending a Labor Day dinner with over 100 people, generally of a certain age, in a private room in a restaurant, thinking that her husband and another guy—a famous CEO in the fashion world—were the only ones who could hear, because of Fortell. “After, I think Bob got 12 or 14 emails saying, ‘How do I get those hearing aids?’”
Now that the product is launched, Fortell will sell hearing aids in a single clinic on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. It’s decked out like a posh lounge, with the devices on display in a tasteful presentation that’s straight out of the Apple retail playbook. Hanging on the wall is a silicon wafer with the circuitry of the custom chips. In the early stages, his staff of four audiologists will serve only a couple of dozen customers a week, to make sure everything goes smoothly. In any case, while ramping up production, the supply will be limited.
This is great for Fortell, but it seems de Jonge’s initial impulse to usher everyone’s grandparents into the land of the hearing is in danger of being limited to the one percent, which doesn’t exactly qualify him for a Salk medal. When I ask de Jonge how his invention can scale to change life for the masses, his replies, whether due to secrecy on future plans or just not having a good answer, seem hand-wavy. In his defense, Fortell has resisted the temptation to jack up the traditional price of premium hearing aids—the $6,800 is actually a bit less than some other medically prescribed hearing aids. (As with other high-end hearing aids, the price is part of a package that includes fitting and support from professional audiologists.) Still, even that defensible price tag limits adoption; it’s a sad fact that some Medicare and many health insurance plans do not cover hearing aids, a policy that dooms millions to an aural bardo of conversational exclusion, isolating them from loved ones and hastening dementia.
It’s unclear whether Fortell technology might find its way into the less expensive over-the-counter hearing aids available today, which became possible via a Biden-era shift in regulation. These include Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 devices and entries from other consumer electronics brands, which are generally known to help those with hearing loss but not as much as high-end devices that are paired with professional support. The Fortell proposition requires careful testing and tuning, continuing for some time as wearers get used to the devices. In any case, that white-glove approach will consume Fortell’s efforts for the next year and more. Expansion will come by opening clinics in a few select cities, and only later will Fortell consider scaling to allow others to sell the technology.
The Met Police has announced that its deployment of permanent live facial recognition (LFR) cameras in Croydon has led to 103 arrests, with the force claiming it has reduced crime in the local area by 12%.
Beginning in October 2025, the Met fixed 15 LFR-enabled cameras to street furniture in Croydon, claiming they would only be activated when officers are present and conducting an operation in the area.
The Met’s announcement comes just a week ahead of a judicial review against its use of LFR, which will assess whether it has been using the technology lawfully. The legal challenge was launched by anti-knife campaigner Shaun Thompson after he was wrongly identified as a suspect by the force’s LFR system, alongside privacy campaigners at Big Brother Watch.
While LFR is typically deployed by the force in an overt manner, with specially equipped cameras mounted atop a visibly marked police van to scan and compare people’s unique facial features against watchlists in real time, this marks the Met’s first covert deployment of the cameras that can be monitored by officers remotely.
In a press release, the Met claimed that running deployments without a van has increased the efficiency of its LFR operations, with an arrest being made on average every 34 minutes when in use, while also reducing the average time to locate wanted individuals by more than 50% when compared with van-based deployments.
Of those arrested, it added a third were for offences related to violence against women and girls, such as strangulation and sexual assault, with other arrests over recall to prison, burglary and possession of an offensive weapon.
“The increase in LFR deployments across crime hotspots in London is driven by its proven impact and success – with more than 1,700 dangerous offenders taken off London’s streets since the start of 2024, including those wanted for rape and child abuse,” said Lindsey Chiswick, the Met and national lead for LFR.
“This is why we are trialling a new and innovative pilot in Croydon,” she said. “It allows us to explore a different way of using facial recognition by operating it remotely and more efficiently. The amount of arrests we have made in just 13 deployments shows the technology is already making an impact and helping to make Croydon safer. Public support remains strong, with 85% of Londoners backing the use of LFR to keep them safe.”
The Met added that its pilot deployment of permanent LFR cameras will undergo an evaluation in the coming months to assess its effectiveness, but that there are currently no plans to expand its permanent deployment to other sites in London.
It also said the Met will continue to run engagement sessions with Croydon residents and councillors to explain how LFR works, outline the intelligence-led approach behind deployments, and set out the safeguards in place to protect privacy and rights.
However, in April 2025, in the wake of the Met’s initial announcement, local councillors previously complained that the decision to set up facial recognition cameras permanently took place without any community engagement from the force with local residents.
While the Met has further claimed that Croydon was selected for the permanent LFR deployment due to “its status as a crime hotspot”, local councillors also highlighted a pattern of racial bias in its choice of deployment locations.
“The Met’s decision to roll out facial recognition in areas of London with higher Black populations reinforces the troubling assumption that certain communities … are more likely to be criminals,” said Green Party London Assembly member Zoë Garbett at the time, adding that while nearly two million people in total had their faces scanned across the Met’s 2024 deployments, only 804 arrests were made – a rate of just 0.04%.
The Met Police’s roll-out of LFR in other boroughs has similarly taken place with little to no community engagement, and in some areas has occurred despite notable political opposition from local authorities.
Executive mayor of Croydon Jason Perry said in the Met’s press release, however, that the arrest figures show “that this pioneering technology is helping to make our streets safer”.
Broken windows in the panopticon
Perry added: “I look forward to continuing to work with the Met Police to tackle crime, as part of our zero-tolerance approach to fixing the ‘broken windows’, restoring pride in our borough and making Croydon a safer place for all our residents.”
Under the “broken windows” theory of policing, first posited by US criminologists James Wilson and George Kelling in the early 1980s, leaving even minor disorder unchecked (such as graffiti, antisocial behaviour or vandalism) encourages people to engage in more serious crimes.
While advocates of this approach therefore argue for the proactive, zero-tolerance policing of minor infractions as a way of instilling order and deterring more serious criminal conduct, critics argue it encourages aggressive or confrontational policing practices that disproportionally target poor and minoritised communities, ultimately breeding resentment against authorities.
In a recent interview with former prime minister Tony Blair, current UK home secretary Shabana Mahmood described her ambition to use technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and LFR to achieve Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a “panopticon”, referring to his proposed prison design that would allow a single, unseen guard to silently observe every prisoner at once.
Typically used today as a metaphor for authoritarian control, the underpinning idea of the panopticon is that, by instilling a perpetual sense of being watched among the inmates, they would behave as authorities wanted.
“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his panopticon,” Mahmood told Blair. “That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.”
LFR consultation on legal framework
In December 2025, the Home Office launched a 10-week consultation on the use of LFR by UK police, allowing interested parties and members of the public to share their views on how the controversial technology should be regulated.
While the use of LFR by police – beginning with the Met’s deployment at Notting Hill Carnival in August 2016 – has ramped up massively in recent years, there has so far been minimal public debate or consultation, with the Home Office claiming for years that there is already “comprehensive” legal framework in place.
However, the Home Office said in late 2025 that although a “patchwork” legal framework for police facial recognition exists (including for the increasing use of the retrospective and “operator-initiated” versions of the technology), it does not give police themselves the confidence to “use it at significantly greater scale … nor does it consistently give the public the confidence that it will be used responsibly”.
It added that the current rules governing police LFR use are “complicated and difficult to understand”, and that an ordinary member of the public would be required to read four pieces of legislation, police national guidance documents and a range of detailed legal or data protection documents from individual forces to fully understand the basis for LFR use on their high streets.
There have been repeated calls from both Parliament and civil society over many years for the police’s use of facial recognition to be regulated.
This includes three separate inquiries by the Justice and Home Affairs Committee into shoplifting, police algorithms and police facial recognition; two of the UK’s former biometrics commissioners, Paul Wiles and Fraser Sampson; an independent legal review by Matthew Ryder QC; the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission; and the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which called for a moratorium on live facial recognition as far back as July 2019.
More recently, the Ada Lovelace Institute published a report in May 2025 that said the UK’s patchwork approach to regulating biometric surveillance technologies is “inadequate”, placing fundamental rights at risk and ultimately undermining public trust.
In August 2025, after being granted permission to intervene in the judicial review of the Met’s LFR use, the UK’s equality watchdog said the force is using the technology unlawfully, citing the need for its deployments to be necessary, proportionate and respectful of human rights.
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has been called the last decent tech baron. It’s sounds like a flattering label, although one I usually associate more with yacht-dwelling meatheads who feed their herds of cattle homegrown macadamia nuts; the kind of person who can most recently be found wining and dining with the President of the United States and his coterie of MAGA sycophants.
Wales, on the other hand, keeps things relatively low-key. Even as the site he founded, Wikipedia, turns 25 years old this month, he seems more interested in fixing his home Wi-Fi than joining the tech elite’s performative power games. He has also spent the past few months promoting a new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, that uses Wikipedia’s overarching strategy and unlikely rise to articulate Wales’ playbook for fixing much of what’s broken in today’s deeply polarized and antagonistic society.
On this week’s episode of The Big Interview, Wales and I discussed what it means to build something used by billions of people that’s not optimized for growth at all costs. During our discussion he reflected on Wikipedia’s messy, human origins, the ways it’s been targeted by governments from Russia to Saudi Arabia, and the challenges of holding the line on neutrality in an online ecosystem hostile to the notion that facts even exist. We also talked about what threatens Wikipedia now, from AI to conspiracy-pilled billionaires, and why he’ll never edit an entry about Donald Trump. Read our full conversation below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Jimmy Wales, welcome to The Big Interview. Thank you so much for being here.
JIMMY WALES: Thanks for having me on.
We always start these conversations with a few quick questions, like a little warmup for your brain. Are you ready?
Yes.
What’s an internet rabbit hole you’ve fallen into most recently?
Home Assistant. I’ve just started using Home Assistant to run smart home devices, and there’s a huge community and thousands of things to read about and so on and so forth. So it’s what I’m obsessed with.
What is this community doing?
Troubleshooting. People are working on extensions to deal with every kind of thing in the world, and it’s amazing.
What’s a subject you never argue about online anymore?
I would say I don’t argue with anybody about trans issues. There’s absolutely no point in it. It’s too toxic. I never did argue about it, but I don’t even talk about it.
You’re just going to stay away.
Yeah, it’s too unpleasant.
What do you trust more: Wikipedia or ChatGPT?
Definitely Wikipedia.
I had to ask. What’s your favorite website or app that is not Wikipedia?
I really do like parts of Reddit. There’s some really great communities on Reddit, and great people. I lurk and read in the personal finance subreddit. There’s just a lot of really nice people there. I’m always amazed by it.
Reddit is really having a moment. I find that I spend a lot more time lurking in the Reddit app on my phone, because I would rather read thoughtful conversations than scroll on X.
That’s exactly it. It’s like a place with paragraphs.
And often really thoughtful people. What is the best thing about living in the UK versus the US?
Well, my family’s here. I always say this about the US: Tech is in Silicon Valley, and politics is in Washington, and movies and showbiz are in LA, and finance is in New York. But all those things are in London.
So if I lived in Silicon Valley, I would only have tech friends because that’s who lives there. Whereas in London, it’s much more comprehensive. All kinds of people. So I like that.
The latest step in its parent company’s plan to move customers off the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and upgrade to new digital services has seen Openreach reveal 132 UK exchange locations, covering 1.23 million premises, where the business aims to halt the sale of traditional copper-based phone and broadband services.
The BT-owned broadband company has regarded the shift from copper to full-fibre networks as “every bit as significant as the move from analogue to digital and black and white TV to colour”.
The programme was first mooted in 2019, with legacy network skills and parts increasingly difficult to come by, and with digital services – such as voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing and other apps – becoming more popular and effective. By retiring analogue phone lines, Openreach said it would create a simplified network to meet the enhanced needs of an increasingly digital society.
In practical terms, BT is in the process of transitioning more than 14 million traditional lines across the UK onto digital services to realise its plan on a national basis. The stop sell process is triggered when a majority (75%) of premises connected to a particular BT comms exchange can get a full-fibre connection.
Customers who then want to switch, upgrade or regrade their broadband or phone service will have to take a new digital service over Openreach’s full-fibre network. People and business using these exchanges not yet able to get full-fibre at their premises won’t be affected and can stay on their existing copper-based service until full fibre becomes available.
Following the decision to shut down the PSTN, it was agreed to test processes for migrating customers to fibre services and, ultimately, withdraw legacy copper services and the wholesale line rental products that rely on them. Openreach is giving communications providers – such as BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone, which all use its network – a year’s notice that it will no longer be selling legacy analogue products and services in these circumstances.
Despite the general progress in the programme, in May 2024, BT Group revised its timetable for moving all customers off the PSTN from its original date of the end of 2025 to January 2027. The new deadline followed a series of improvements to the programme that BT assured would better protect vulnerable customers and those with additional needs, including telecare users. BT added that its revised approach will result in a single switch for the majority of customers – both businesses and consumers.
By mid-February 2026, stop sell rules will have been activated in 1,281 exchanges across the UK, representing around 12.5 million premises where Openreach full-fibre is available to a majority of premises and copper products cannot be sold, 51% of the company’s total full-fibre footprint.
The Openreach full-fibre network is currently available to 21 million premises, around 60%, and the provider is aiming for 25 million connections by the end of 2026 and 30 million by 2030, subject to the right regulatory conditions.
Commenting on the latest step in the programme, James Lilley, Openreach’s managed customer migrations director, said: “Our stop sell programme is a vital step in accelerating the UK’s transition to a modern full-fibre future. As copper’s ability to support modern communications declines, the immediate focus is getting people onto newer, future-proofed technologies.
“By phasing out legacy copper-based services in areas where fibre is now widely available, we’re ensuring customers and providers move onto faster, more reliable digital infrastructure. This approach not only reduces the cost and complexity of having to maintain both old and new networks, but also supports the industry-wide migration ahead of the legacy copper-based PSTN now just over 12 months away, by which time everyone will need a digital phone line.”
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