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Comment by washywashy | Hacker News Reader

We need to invent something that does the opposite now where individuals could wear something that prevents them from showing up in someone else’s content without explicit digital consent (some sort of personal scrambler). I don’t think the LED feature listed on this product page will often be honored by most people who will use these shades

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Something like the scramble suit from A scanner darkly? It's based on Philip K. Dick's novel published in 1977.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aS4xhTaIPc

> some sort of personal scrambler

We're nearly at the "Foundation" levels of surveillance tech, but with no countermeasures in sight to oppose that. Even resisting web browser fingerprinting is difficult.

Nobody with an effective countermeasure is going to share it, or even let you know it exists.

The days of open communication about privacy (lol) are long gone!

It’s not so much having a countermeasure but having countermeasures be built in to the system. Similar to a concept called gevulot in the book Quantum Thief.

The gevulot is not good enough. Linking knowledge access to everybodies' consent doesn't work.

There is another way...

There are strong incentives for secrecy (military applications), hence encryption which provides solid foundations for private communication in civilian tech. I wonder if counter-surveillance tech could take the same route (e.g. ordinary soldiers can no longer afford to not carry a smartphone -> strong incentive to protect them from tracking; maybe I'm extrapolating too far).

It's more likely that the military would provide soldiers with phones using a special version of Android with less tracking than it is that they'd mandate Google stop snooping on everybody for national security reasons. They take advantage of the data Google collects, the fact that everyone is carrying a mobile wire (mic and camera) filled with radios collecting and broadcasting location info, and that for many people a single device they carry acts as a treasure trove of information on them, who they've been talking to, and what they've been doing.

A Halloween costume that changes the shape of the body and face should suffice. Let's all dress up as "V" from V for Vendetta. Some would say a persons gait can give them away so we can all walk or sashay like a runway model. The costume needs an RF blocking pocket for fondle slabs. I can picture this happening. Low tech, affordable, concept can be applied to any costume. Optional platform boots to balance peoples height.

An old, low-tech way to change gait, is to put a small pebble in your shoe.

There are no "hard" countermeasures possible, not technological ones - you're fighting against the laws of physics here, which mandate that everything constantly radiates information about what it's doing, in every direction, at the speed of light. Advancement of surveillance is advancement in being able to discern that information. You can try and introduce noise, but you're still fighting uphill, against the whole fields of signal processing and information theory.

The only "countermeasures" we can have are "soft" ones - social, political and legal. Convince people to treat privacy as core value, and surveillance as repugnant. Make forms of surveillance illegal. Mandate by law to have surveillance capabilities in devices handicapped by design. But this, at best, only solves the problem for regular people and some of the time, while governments stay stable and sane - the possibility of deeper surveillance is still there, just the choice to perform it seems unattractive at a given moment.

We can jam and destroy a drone with RF .. it should also work on less protected gear like smart glasses.

I think we still have an option of a privacy regulation that requires explicit expiring consent on any kind PII handling and a private right of action to enforce it (e.g. small claims court).

In the sci-fi novel "The Mountain in the Sea" (highly recommended btw) there is a piece of tech called "abglanz" which is an identity shield mask that flickers in iridescent blurry patterns to protect a person's privacy from camera surveillance.

A similar device is central in Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" too.

I seem to recall a similar device in. “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell”. I think it was a collar-type device you wore but maybe it was closer to a helmet.

Also gevulot in Quantum Thief - mentioned in nested comment above

Similar necklace in Daemon / Freedom by Daniel Swarez.

Check out Adam Harvey's "CV Dazzle" and other related design efforts. CV Dazzle is from 2010 but still very cool, the concept is generally to design cyberpunk clothing and headware that is adversarial to face detection algorithms. Algorithms are always changing, but I'm sure there will always be attacks of this nature. We could see them pop up in military applications in addition to personal privacy.

https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle

https://yr.media/tech/guide-to-anti-surveillance-fashion/

So that you can't use them to protect yourself against people stalking you, or to collect evidence in the case of potential crime?

Thinking out loud:

This sounds like legislation. Mandate (with stiff penalties for violations) that any recording in the presence of a certain BLE advertised value (that's anonymized) means that all people should be removed from the scene with current image generation AI tooling? Not sure what to do about in frame vs out of frame, but perhaps this sparks something.

Yeah. The creepy is back. When Google released its glasses, people jumped on it right away always gave me weird vibes. Why would someone want to do it? What is an everyday function that would be greatly improved by this, aside from some professional application?

I saw some such wearables during the Hong Kong demonstrations couple of years back

Do you have a link to that?

They are talking about an art project from students at a dutch university and are misinformed. https://youtu.be/D1Thmz61sho

That’s a very uncharitable interpretation of what I wrote. Here is more information on what I actually meant: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/style/article/protest-design-future-...

They Live! (1988) - we need to invent these glasses that lay bare our unknown knowns.

Like that suit in A Scanner Darkly.

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