I watched Spider-Man: Brand New Day. In the latest instalment, Tom Holland’s Peter Parker can be seen using an AI-powered assistant to engage in mass surveillance. This is not the first Marvel movie to use futuristic surveillance on unsuspecting citizens, and it is definitely not the last. Remember Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where Nick Fury describes Project Insight as “We’re going to neutralise a lot of threats before they even happen”? This led to Steve Rogers’ famous counter: “I thought the punishment usually came after the crime.”

In Brand New Day, Parker uses an AI assistant to access every security camera in the entire city and run facial recognition algorithms to track a specific person. While this looks slick, in the process, our friendly superhero ends up violating the privacy of millions of innocent civilians.

In 2026, this is no longer fiction, and that is something which is deeply concerning. The system here eerily feels similar to the type of technology developed by AI surveillance companies like Peter Thiel’s Palantir or Flock Safety. However, the film........

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