Why Snapchat making augmented reality glasses isn’t that bad an idea | Hacker News Reader

Why Snapchat making augmented reality glasses isn’t that bad an idea

devdiner.com

15 pointsakent24 comments

Not sure if i want any friend to be wearing a camera (inside anything) that's constantly photographing or filming me while talking with them...

The writer doesn't seem to mind though.

In principle this perhaps would be not a big issue, but Snapchat is a Facebook company.

Snapchat is not a Facebook company. They were offered $3b from Facebook in 2013 but they declined. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/13/snapchat-spurned-3-bi...

Oh, you are right. Thank you for this. I somehow have overlooked it.

Nobody wants that, but you better get used to it. The world we live in is post-privacy.

I mean, my phone and watch can silently record you, too. As can Google Glass, the dozens of CCTV cameras you encounter daily, and Steve Mann's face. It will hardly be any more time before consumers are able to see through walls.

The future is not set in stone. You cannot predict the future. You cannot even tell what happens in the next 5 minutes.

Privacy is a significant concern for many. Not just individuals, but organizations work to ensure privacy is respected, and more (e.g. through policy). Active research occurs, and technology is developed specifically to create privacy-respecting systems and augment the ones that don't already do so.

We're not talking about the future, so prediction is unnecessary. But to your point: in my experience as an experienced and security-inclined engineer, this is an arms race where privacy doesn't win.

You are approaching the problem from the wrong angle. It is not an engineering problem first.

And as a person who understands more about the problem, it is in fact your obligation to stand up and explain this to a fellow man, not just stand hands down in defeat.

I did just explain that, and was told I was predicting things that have already happened...

I think people rather told you that regardless what has been happened, this does not have to be in the future.

The future is what we make it to be. All technology does not work inside a vacuum, it works in the society and society is made up by contracts, most importantly it is made up by laws and the laws are made, at least in democracy by elected representatives.

The future is what we, as a whole, collectively, 7 billion people, make it to be.

Unfortunately I think the writing is already on the wall. We've moving towards a world where everyone will be recording everything all the time. Soon my glasses will be recording everything I see all the time and you won't even know it. The advantages of being able to replay things you saw, record conversations, record accidents and incidents with police, record controversial things at work, are all too great.

People are already doing this with dashcams in their cars.

We're moving into a world where privacy will simply become impossible.

Personally I do not think that the recording is a problem by itself. Problem is with who this recording is shared.

Exactly, I would love to have real valid AR glasses where we can add metadata to everyday life. If it could be built without the posiblity to take a photo it would be better, but you would loose half of the functions and people would not use it, cause whats the use of a camera if you cant take photos or video. Also with the IoT stuff coming online, it looks more and more like these AR devices wont matter in regards to private as everything will be recording everything anyway.

The only place these IoT things should be is on the shelves if companies are stupid enough to produce them. :(

I try to explain it always if I have change. Our houses should not leak information. This is very dangerous for the society as a whole.

I was with you until "society is made up by contracts", and you lost me entirely with laws. Most of society exists outside the ambit of either law or contract.

Well, we do have a lot of social contracts. Thats basically how we function as a society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

Indeed, as society we can make certain behaviour unlawful regardless of technical possibilities. We can imprison and isolate people from the society who act against such laws. We just have to make our minds clear what these laws should be.

My only concern is that non state level organized actors can get large advantage over the society using these laws.

It's unfortunately required for AR displays to work correctly.

Not if they use lasers instead of cameras to read the environment. Plus, lasers work in day/night while cameras and IR will have issues.

I can still get great facial recognition data out of LIDAR. In fact I can get just as much data from you with LIDAR as I can an image, because they are precision depth by default. For example I can "bounce" my LIDAR into your bag and see what's inside that might not be visible otherwise.

There are a lot of issues with microLIDAR - notwithstanding that it's at least 5 years from commercialization.

I've never heard of LIDAR before, will check it out.

Why is it 5 years from commercialization?

5 Years is probably generous.

1. They are only now being shown in R&D to be possible to make small enough for consumer devices. How do produce at wide scale is unknown and how they would be implemented in a stack is unknown.

2. It's unclear if the market is there for applications that need LIDAR over more proven IR or cheaper CV techniques.

3. FCC requirements are a pain for active sensors like LIDAR or Ultrasonics on consumer devices

God help us all.

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