Comment by CaptainZapp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CaptainZapp | Hacker News Reader

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Huh, I just want my heads up life display because...why not?

Assuming that your heads-up live display contains a public facing camera here's: Why not!

I don't like sitting in a bar (or a strip club, or in any other semi-public, or even public dodgy or non-dodgy place) and you hang there with your heads-up live display recording my image.

I don't like the fact that it's uploaded to some tech behemoth' server for further analysis (or even if not - by you later to your personal social media page, controlled by such a company).

I don't like an army of people like you recording every little nuance of my life, which then gets abused to feed even more AI algorithms by companies whom's major raison d'être is to violate all our privacy and infringing on my personal rights without permission or consent.

And no! Locking myself permanently into a room is really not a solution conductive to me or for us as a society.

Remember Google glass and why it failed? Not because the tech couldn't be useful. But it failed thanks to a company, which didn't give a shit about the impact of such tech and an army of glassholes (here's a nice example[1]) who cared even less.

I think the answer to your "why not" and to your personal gratification is that the price for us as a society is far too expensive.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+scoble+glass+hole

Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded. Police have body cams, cars have dash cams, almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video, the chance that you are being recorded if someone wants to is already very high.

A glass cam will probably work out the same way CCTV has: people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass.

Google Glass wasn’t ready, the tech isn’t ready yet. People stopped using it because it wasn’t useful. The tech will be useful someday, however.

Luddites complained about the automated loom as well, saying the cost to society was too great despite its benefits. It didn’t work out well for them in the end.

>Luddites complained about the automated loom as well, saying the cost to society was too great despite its benefits

They actually didn't. They just broke them because they (rightly) saw that as an effective means of raising the price of their artisanship.

The luddites are more akin to the Paris Uber strikers - who also weren't anti technology.

the chance that you are being recorded if someone wants to is already very high.

OK, good, you understand the origin of the problem. Modern technology has co-opted ordinary people to act as spies for big, powerful data processing organisations, in the process seriously undermining our privacy.

Now, how do we solve it?

Yes, the cameras are all around, but no, they aren’t spying on you, why should they? Most video just gets deleted unless some event happened, they don’t even archive it.

I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.

Yes, the cameras are all around, but no, they aren’t spying on you, why should they?

How can you ever be sure of that, though?

Devices get hacked.

The manufacturers of devices sell out, with or without being transparent about it.

Data hoarders grab more data than they should or they have the device owner's informed consent to take.

These things happen all the time, with everything from photos and videos and audio, to location information, via address books and "private" messages. As a third party who is not the device's maker or owner, you have little if any say about any of it. However, the combination of many devices capable of observing you and associating audio/video data with other information about you and the potential dangers created when this is done at scale in a highly asymmetric situation is enough to all but annihilate privacy, and more importantly, the underlying reasons we have come to value privacy in the past.

I guess we could get rid of all the cameras and have everyone walk around with blind folds so they can respect everyone else’s privacy from being seen, but it seems like a net negative in my book.

There is a vast, qualitative difference between someone casually walking past you in the street where the two of you see each other but pay little attention and move on, or even catching you incidentally in a photo taken for personal reasons and not shared, and the systematic, widespread acquisition of huge data sets drawn from multiple sources with or without the data subject's informed consent or even knowledge to be stored indefinitely in an automatically searchable format and then used for purposes unknown by parties unknown with consequences unknown to the data subject.

Let's say I'm grocery shopping or whatever and there's 3 people recording for whatever reason. Now I'm on their video, on Facebook, very likely to be tagged.

No thank you.

If they can do that, I am free to fly a drone above their head.

CCTVs exist for the business and to protect the business, and used to actually be closed-circuit. Now that a lot of them are becoming "cloud", they will create a lot of the same problems.

The difference with voluntary mass surveillance in combination with AI and social credit is that it incentivizes people to rat on each other to the government or Facebook.

Sigh! Where to start? OK, let me give it a shot.

Luddites complained about the automated loom as well

Now that's a really bad case of whataboutism. I'm not complaining about technological advance. I'm complaining about tech, which is a massive invasion of privacy. Have you ever been lying on a beach and some asshole lets his drone flying around? I don't know about you, but I really don't fancy to be half naked on some cretin's social media feed without my consent (which, needless to say I didn't give and would never ever provide).

Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded.

I'm aware of that. I'm also aware that if such an establishment uploads the feed to the internet they'll go out of business mighty fast. In addition I don't have cops hanging around semi private places constantly recording what's going on in such places.

Those establishments may have a justified use, namely security, for such tech. You don't.

almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video

That was one of the more stupid arguments used by glassholes. When you whip out your phone and start recording that's obvious as hell. Not so, when you do it by a wearable.

people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass

Actually they are very much. There were umpteen stories about glassholes using their gizmos even in places that explicitly banned their use. They then had the nerve to complain publicly about "ludites" that deemed this unacceptable.

Here's a search for you:

"privacy abuse google glass"

It yields 53’900’000 results. If just one procent of one procent involve actual stories of real privacy violations that's a massive invasion of societal privacy for ones own gratification. And that's exactly what's completely unacceptable.

You're free to believe in your techno utopia and that it only leads to progess and betterment of humanity.

I think you're wrong and believe my arguments to be sound as proven by the last 20 years and the rise of those tech behemoths and their constantly shitty behavior.

Calling me a ludite and using tech, which truly benefited humanity to make your argument makes you, in my opinion, intellectually dishonest.

And that's where I'll close my argument, since it's pretty obvious that we'll never agree.

> When you whip out your phone and start recording that's obvious as hell. Not so, when you do it by a wearable.

Not necessarily obvious. You most likely can't tell if someone is just holding his phone in his hands, or is recording you. There are apps that don't show a preview or any other clues on screen, so you won't know even if you get to see their screen.

We have had CCTVs around for the last 30 years, where are the massive privacy violations that you guys predicted 30 years ago?

Very very few people had google glass to begin with, the glass hole term was invented and perpetuated by a bunch of conspiracy theorists, enough to get 3.9 million hits on google (for < 1000 units?), it provides no evidence of anything.

Tech Luddism is as old as technology itself. It isn’t surprising that you don’t want this, that you don’t want other people to have this, we’ve gone down this road before and we will go down it again.

Tech Luddism has nothing to do with these arguments. I do not want tech that someone else controls, because it benefits 'them', not me. I want tech that I can control. See, e.g., Free Software Foundation and Purism.

CCTV footage wasn’t uploaded for everyone to see and comment on. It is usually closed to owners of them, and authorities who have reason to use it for investigation of a crime.

Using the “conspiracy theorist” argument is a typical way of trying to put a negative label on a group of people you disagree with these days. 3.9 million results doesn’t sound like a group of 10 mentally unsound people spewing a BS conspiracy. It provides evidence that a large portion of people don’t agree with the tech.

>Those bars and strip clubs already have plenty of CCTVs, you are being recorded. Police have body cams, cars have dash cams, almost every phone has a camera capable of taking video, the chance that you are being recorded if someone wants to is already very high.

>A glass cam will probably work out the same way CCTV has: people are worried about the potential for privacy abuse, but in the end these fears don’t come to pass.

The first two Cs in CCTV don't stand for instantly uploading everything to a 3rd party for analysis.

CCTV is fundamentally different than the "instantly send the data to a central server" model that currently dominates because CCTV is not reviewed except when it needs to be.

> instantly send the data to a central server

and in addition... share it on social media. Benign examples being your girlfriend just saw you on Twitter buying a ring for her by virtue of facial recognition and auto-tagging.

Always-on glasses constantly recording and uploading video are at least very illegal in Germany. I know we are sometimes too conservative and risk-averse but always-recording AR glasses are a bit too much.

I thought Google Glass had some success within companies?

It currently is having success in enterprise, albeit probably in environments where everyone signed a waiver or Google said they weren't beaming data from the glasses anywhere the company didn't want it to go.

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