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Comment by thomassmith65 | Hacker News Reader

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thomassmith65

We already have:

– Crypto to enable black markets for stolen/leaked personal data

– BitTorrent to make huge downloads (ie: of leaked data) feasible

– Facial Recognition to attach a name to a face (ie: using leaked data)

– portable drives capable of storing 1TB+ (ie: of leaked data)

If AR goggles are successful, it could be at least as bad a blow to privacy as the success of social media was. They are the last remaining puzzle piece.

If Apple spearheads this, Apple's reputation eventually could take a hit (obviously to the extent that everyone comes to see AR goggles as a nuisance).

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Sorry for my confusion, but what do AR goggles have to do with the rest of the things you listed?

he's saying that you can build large, grey area or outright illegal, databases to do realtime face recognition on any random people you meet, with the ability to pull up tidbits or very private information there and then.

Exactly. Thanks

I think your model is too futuristic, if some of the hackernews don't quite grok what you're talking about, imagine trying to communicate this complicated chain of dependencies in a format of a nyt article.

most likely before such a threat model gets public exposure, you're going to already have legitimate implementations of this technology that will seem positive and benign.

for example, apple already does face recognition on your photos and then ties them contact names. now a gimmicky but totally futuristic use-case that you can demo in a commercial: you send your friend a contact from your address book, and in addition to phone numbers and emails it has a chunk of trained dataset for the contact's face. now you go meet this contact in person, and your ar "recognizes" the contact for you. the commercial will involve a meeting at a fancy Manhattan restaurant "oh hey you're Jeremy!" (you're welcome, nameless apple employee reading this post)

but see totally benign. by the time hackers get to it, it'll be ebil darknet russians breaking nice and pure future tech.

AR goggles require a built-in camera. Presumably the glasses will be portable.

The hardware required for AR glasses to do what they are advertised to do (eg: translate street signs, overlay advertisements while you're trying to eat, etc) is sufficient to identify anyone walking by*.

Not hard to write software to display on the wearer's HUD, for example, random photos and social media posts of whoever enters their field of view.

*providing the other things in my comment are in place.

Google Glass specifically prohibited using the camera for facial recognition —- but let you silently take pictures and video and post them to Google+.

They literally blocked a useful feature (recognizing people you have already met) and promoted a feature nobody wanted (posting pictures of people without consent).

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