Augmented Reality and the Surveillance Society | Hacker News Reader

Augmented Reality and the Surveillance Society

spectrum.ieee.org

49 pointssamizdis20 comments

As someone who works in AR, the potential downsides of AR worry me.

One the plus side we can make the blind see and the deaf hear. We can keep dementia patients safe, and I can find my fucking keys.

Also AR porn is going to be wild.

However, we really have to interrogate the technology it's self.

Ar needs hyper accurate location to work. This means both SLAM and off device location services.

To make the location services work we need a global database of visual keypoints to allow devices figure out their position to the nearest MM. We are not far away from that now. (google have already launched a service in google maps.)

This means that any picture taken in public, or in view of windows, will leak your location.

What I worry about most is Apps that might be allowed to run on these glasses.

With mm level location services, and onboard acceleration for face detection and recognition, its trivial for an app maker to create a Uber stalking app.

You are making a big leap between using this at home and using it on the go. For one thing, nobody has battery technology good enough to allow someone to walk around with a headset on for the entire day.

This claim of yours to mm accuracy needed leading to mass surveillance is a figment of an over active imagination. Will there eventually be googles on everyone and tracking for those? Yes, probably when we have nuclear batteries. Will we have other privacy invading tactics wielded against us by more unethical corporations in the meantime? You bet.

I can barely keep my phone charged all day.

> For one thing, nobody has battery technology good enough to allow someone to walk around with a headset on for the entire day

Facebook's project Aria does this now. Apple has a set of glasses in development that are more impressive and actually has screens. Google? fuck knows.

> This claim of yours to mm accuracy needed leading to mass surveillance is a figment of an over active imagination

This is my professional area of interest. Sadly its your imagination that's letting you down. Google and Apple know where you are at all times. As does your phone service provider. An app _can_ steal your location, but that's fairly obvious, or not very accurate. This is because your phone's location is only accurate when either using GPS, or lots of post processing by your service provider. All of which sucks power.

AR _requires_ that location services fit in a budget of <250mw. You can't have AR without visual positioning. You can't have visual positioning without a database of key points.

Once you have a database of keypoints, anybody can geo locate a picture within 5 minutes, automatically. This means that even if the AR glasses app blocks out precise location, its trivial to recover afterwards. This means that any app that runs on these glasses can trivially create it's own surveillance network. That is the risk.

> Will we have other privacy invading tactics wielded against us by more unethical corporations in the meantime?

I'm specifically talking about AR, and AR only.

You don't think it's possible with in the decade?

I would not rule that out, combating 2010 tech to 2020 tech.

With such localization capabilities from on images in public/outdoor, stalking/doxxing based on social media will get more common?

If you don’t mind sharing, in what capacity do you work in AR?

I'm a devop for a company that makes visual location services specifically for AR.

If it gets that good maybe we can get those Stalkers to spend their lives chasing after imaginary people and leave everyone else alone.

That would stop opportunistic stranger stalking only, no?

It's a brief article, and worth a read.

If you use software to guide and support you in any environment and it's not free software (free as in speech, and as in the definition provided by the FSF), then even though that non-free software may provide you with short-term benefits (that may be worth it), you've given up some of your autonomy to another party.

People will downplay that aspect of software all the time - "proprietary software is good for business thanks to support contracts", "people don't care as long as the software works", "free software has poor usability". That's understandable and those are beliefs that those people usually genuinely hold, but it doesn't change the underlying principle of the situation.

(this generally applies to hardware and computing platforms too)

[1] - https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

Seems like this could be an interesting article but all I get at that link is the infinite spinner. How come does an article about surveillance require JavaScript to be enabled? JavaScript is one of the key enablers of surveillance.

Indeed. You should be able to read the archived version here:

https://archive.is/ixk9X

I wonder if in the AR age this decade might end up being defined as, LIDAR will become the de facto outward-mapping tool to preserve some semblance of privacy while still capturing enough to make it viable and valuable?

I wasn't familiar with Project Aria, as mentioned in the article. Searched for it, and found the facebook connect demo. I enjoyed that the demo'er was kind enough to refer to Aria as an Evil-lution @ 32 seconds in. https://youtu.be/a0QVh5TJl3c?t=30

If anyone has additional reading along these lines, please post.

How to Address Privacy Questions Raised by the Expansion of Augmented Reality in Public Spaces - ITIF [think tank]

https://itif.org/publications/2020/12/14/how-address-privacy...

Edit to add: Also this from the EFF a couple of months ago.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/augmented-reality-must...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgw8RLHv1j4

"Still Logged In: What AR and VR Can Learn from MMOs"

Raph Koster (lead designer of Ultima Online) gave a very good talk about this problem and the broader topic of VR/AR being used as a weapon.

I am happy that AR and IOT are getting delayed so much. I hope these stupid gimmicks never make it.

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