You’ve made this same basic reply that “it’s about reducing friction” to everyone that points out the same obvious point that this has been possible for decades. And imply that somehow because of this reduced friction now it’s different. But even that reduced friction has been possible for decades. And more importantly, friction is meaningless to an actor with ill intent.

Voice activated digital covert recorders that could record full days of conversation have been available for at least 20 years. I remember I bought one in the early 2000s. It ran on a single AAA battery was half the size of a pack of cigarettes and could record 16 hours of audio into its internal memory and then dump that audio as wave files to a PC over USB and then the included software would transcribe it to text files if you so desired.

Hanging a digital recorder around your neck and recording everything is not new and this risk of being recorded has been around even longer than that.

I’m a little concerned that there are some people out there that think this is somehow something new that they now need to worry about, and not something they shouldn’t have been thinking about for the last couple of decades.

Good luck with the shunning. Just because the current generation is an identifiable black cylinder doesn’t mean that you will be able to identify all versions of this. Think about it, how many people do you know that wear Apple Watches? Same capabilities there. You going to shun and avoid everyone that wears jewelry?

Regardless there is nothing you can do about it if you are public place, you are in public place you have zero expectation of privacy. If you want to frisk people when they come in your home or business and confiscate their electronics you can do that too.

And don’t want to alarm you but it might concern you to learn that you don’t need to remove your phone from your pocket to record someone.