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Comment by nox101 | Hacker News Reader

I know this video is both a dystopian vision and also an inspiring vision at the same time but, now that we have VR/AR/MR and thought through the privacy implications, most of what's in this video seems close to impossible without zero privacy.

Want bus notifications? They'd need to send them by your location, otherwise they'd have to broadcast all bus locations in the entire world to all people.

Want info in the supermarket? The supermarket gets to know everywhere your eyes wondered. Not just which products you looked at but which other people you looked at.

Similar issues for everything else.

When I first saw this video back when it came out I was mostly on the inspired side and assumed I could turn off the ads. Now, not so much.

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I don't think it has to be like that.

You already are giving "someone" that information when you look up a bus schedule on the web. But, downloading a bus schedule for an entire state doesn't seem unreasonable, and only locates you down to a state.

I don't think the supermarket needs to know where your eyes wandered. An app can have information in it about all the products in the store and handle it on-device. There's no need to transmit real-time eye tracking to the store just for this purpose.

I'm sure that stores would _love_ this information, but it's not needed for the experiences mentioned. I don't think you'd need any more information than you'd already provide by searching the web.

Also, though I don't necessarily think Apple is altruistic in everything, if I'm guessing today, I think Apple would go a similar direction to iCloud Private Relay, and Meta would go the direction that you're worried about.

A bus schedule doesn't give you what you see in that video. That video shows you the bus is arriving, not when the bus was scheduled to arrive. To show those things it needs to know where you are and where the bus is.

Same with the supermarket. It shows you what's actually in front of you, not what some stocker claimed was there when they put stocked the shelf 6 to 72 hours ago.

Other examples would include ads on stores. Your device can't show all ads simultaneously nor can it download all of them at once. Too much data. What it can do is ask each store for it's ad at the moment you get near but now you've just told the store you're near. Even near would be too much data though, looking down a busy shopping street or a a mall. It would likely only download what you look at and now the store knows what you looked.

Except you already have one of those pieces of information -- where you are. Depending on how much privacy we are referring to, it's perfectly reasonable to regularly download the location of all busses in a city. This would locate you to a city, but then on-device you could figure out what you actually care about.

Same with the super market. It's _very_ reasonable to download an ad for one store. Even for multiples.

My argument is "It would likely only download what you look at and now the store knows what you looked.", IS one way to do it, but it does not have to be the way that it's done. If your argument is that you need 100% perfect privacy, and therefore need to download all the data in the world all the time, then that doesn't seem realistic.

3d animated ads are large in terms a size and bandwidth. Yes, I'm 100% sure they are not going to pre-download ads. Even if they aren't 3d they'll be video. Same thing, they aren't going to pre-download the ads. Each ad on each product will only download when you're looking at it and as such they'll know what you're looking at.

It's no different than the maps. Google knows which part of Google maps you're at. With several orders of magnitude more data needed to show all of that stuff in 3D in your POV there's no way they'll pre download it all. They're only going to show what you're looking at right now. Further, much of that they're showing will change daily. When all the displays on Time Square showing real time news end up multiplied by 100s to be virtual displays in AR, it's way more data. All of which needs to be pulled on demand, not pre cached, and all of which needs to be limited to what you see, downloading in directions you're not looking is a waste of bandwidth no one is going to pay for

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