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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

Makes me want a wearable white noise generator, except it's specifically tuned to jam speech transcription AI.

Seriously. It's bad enough sometimes that you go to friends house and have an Alexa responding to every half word. Now we have to put up with this?

For what actual gain? What percentage of a normal friendly conversation is something you want to actually review and document. Less than 5%?

As someone who is not neurotypical I actually could really use something like this due to memory issues associated with my diagnosis. Especially professionally.

Your comment made me think about it differently, thanks.

We don't need to jam these adversarially, we need a wireless protocol that enables polite behavior. Imagine if you were walking around broadcasting "I'm recording" and you run across somebody broadcasting "please don't record". The devices could prompt a conversation between humans.

Changing the dynamic to one that's resolved initially (rather than later, when somebody's upset because they didn't know they were being recorded) would be a significant shift I think.

Except this "problem" has already been resolved (in the US) at a legal level; Look up your states stance on one-party vs. two-party consent for recording private conversations.

The majority (39/50) of states only require the consent of a single party to record a conversation. If you want to take issue with other people recording conversations they have with you, that is something you should take up with your state's legislature.

Wherever possible I think we should prefer ways of getting along with each other which make the state irrelevant.

It's never polite to record when you know the other party does not consent, but I'm not sure it should be illegal.

Not everyone is polite. One might argue that most people aren't.

Wherever possible I think we should prefer ways of getting along with each other.

So do I. And maybe that works on an individual or small-scale level, but it sort of falls apart when talking about a society with tens of millions (or more...) of people with vastly different cultures, values, upbringings, beliefs... We can't just rely on everyone "getting along": we need rules and guidelines. We need laws.

Even in this thread you can see differing opinions on the privacy aspects of this device. When talking about something as important as privacy, I don't think we can afford to just hope everyone agrees with us and... what, ignore the people who don't? That doesn't seem good for society or people living in them.

To expand on this: A lot of this is because even if 90% of people get along/generally agree, it only takes a fraction of that remaining 10% to throw a wrench into everyone’s collective gears. The Internet makes it very easy for a couple of people to make a lot of trouble for thousands with minimal effort

I think that proposal is totally fair, and don’t worry I wasn’t trying to challenge you or something. Just wanted to offer another perspective!

It kind of exists; here's one such video demonstrating the (not as advertised, but still kinda works) results on a microphone.\

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyeCn7HlLck

Younger ears find it excruciating though.

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