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They innovate to infiltrate. 20ish years ago Steve Mann was beat up for invading people's comfort zone with AR glasses, then Google's AR users were "glassholes," now Meta is trying to make it cool. As much as I think AI is valuable, I hope they fail. The act of holding up a smartphone is much more explicit to signal to others they're about to lose all privacy to a centralized company. I don't think Quest is that innovative either, it's mostly first person shooters.

Where does Meta actually talk about things that could really be called "cool" at a society level? Or is it all just empty hype along the lines of Facebook being exploitation of social networking.

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To lose your privacy, you first have to have not already lost it. You're likely on camera right now!

If you have a smartwatch, there's a company out there that knows every breath you take, and every move you make.

Might as well get AR in the mix now that we're here. There are lots of pure sci-fi applications that come with smart glasses.

- AR directions

- all sorts of tutorials for things where you work with your hands. Imagine how easy IKEA furniture can be!

- never forget another name

- metadata about spare parts, products, and recipe ingredients as you look at them

- incredible military applications - team awareness, situational map, aiming reticule

The problem is you're violating other people's privacy, then uploading it.

It depends on your definition of privacy. There's a lot of people who would argue that you don't have a right to privacy in a public setting. And there's a lot of nuance here depending on the state (assuming US).

I'm not a fan of the data being in the hands of a large corporation, but I AM a fan of more video recordings that are not government owned (cough London, Beijing, etc) that helps shine one more light of accountability on the "powers that be".

The idea of having no privacy in public doesn't extend to every cause and creeper creating their own spy system. They are rarely going to focus on useful 'powers that be' issues. They are going to be all about asymmetrical exploitation. If this is let go, anyone with minimal skills and intent will be fully weaponized, some will organize as they do now for lulz or outright malicious activities like doxxing and blackmail, but amplified and "accepted" (without critique, just "cool" innovation for infiltration), and this will be another unrelenting assault on society.

There's no good normal from some people being able to deeply track some other people using all the tools available. It should be strictly forbidden for individuals and corporations to collect and organize this information, and use by government should be strictly limited.

On the other hand, it should be perfectly normal and good for individuals to deeply track companies and governments as bodies. The lack of a society wide focus on this aspect is quite troubling.

Democratize the invasion of privacy!

In all seriousness, your point about Beijing and London makes sense - the horse has bolted on public filming, so every citizen having an always-on camera is probably the best and most likely outcome.

I'm in my house. Hopefully nobody is recording me there. My smartwatch tracks those things but in theory it should not be sharing that with the manufacturer.

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