But as someone who can really use the features for daily use - visual assistance (low vision), alwyas worn set of speakers (no need to futz around with airpods everytime i want to listen to audio without looking like a dork)... I really can't wait for android XR smart glasses (sans display)
Shame the language makes people intrinsically hate the former by associating it with the latter without even questioning it. The idea of smart glasses is cool, the implementations are not.
All major brands have a clear indicator for when they're recording.
Someone could block that indicator out, but someone could also just go to Amazon.com and select one of hundred of available pinhole cameras or not-smart camera glasses.
These aren't enabling an ability that hasn't been enabled for decades. If anything, seeing someone with main brand smart glasses makes it more obvious.
To their credit, smart glasses are an obvious signal for me to avoid. That doesn't make me appreciate them any more.
I do not agree that the existence of surveillance tech justifies the expansion of surveillance tech.
Hidden cameras have been a thing for a long time now. Stick one in a pair of glasses and give it a super short battery life and people freak out...
Now they're being billed as fashion accessories.
Sorry, but "normalize hidden cameras" isn't a movement I can get behind.
Every person holding a cellphone up in their hands could also be pointing a camera around at people, a camera with much higher fidelity, computing power, and one that can take much longer videos.
This is just panic about a new form factor. The same thing happened when cell phones came along, with the exact same talking points.
The same talking points still apply to cell phones. I think people who record TikToks in public are similarly gross and I go out of my way to avoid them.
I watched a guy setup a cell phone to record his laps in a pool yesterday. He swam one lap right about a meter from the 15 year-old girl playing with her mom, then climbed out of the pool, shut off his phone, and walked away. The remainder of the pool was open. Should I have called him out? I couldn't decide, and therefore didn't. This is normal now.
If anything, the primary utility of smart glasses is the wearable display, not camera. YMMV, of course.
But even machine vision-capable devices can do a lot of useful things without causing you any trouble, unless your issues are more of a religious concern rather than anything substantial.
Smart glasses sans camera would address my complaints (I take no issue with smartwatches, for instance), but that admittedly decreases the utility.
But... aren't already existing protections that make it e.g. illegal to distribute your image or its derivatives sufficient? If someone does you wrong, you can seek recourse. If everyone is respectful of each other (and we hate corporations instead of technologies), we enable a lot legitimate uses, making the world better: more accessible, and easier to learn and understand.
My issue is that I don't have the ability to audit every smart glasses user to find out what their tech stack is, so I'm looking at averages. If I saw that smart glasses were being used and promoted as assistive technology, I would likely form a different opinion. Unfortunately, that's not what I perceive. I am open to the possibility that smart glasses could end up a net positive on our society, but the history of similar technologies does not encourage.
I will think more on your comments here. I find them quite insightful.
Edit: For a rather recent example of my threat model, I will repost part of my comment from elsewhere in the thread:
> I watched a guy setup a cell phone to record his laps in a pool yesterday. He swam one lap right about a meter from the 15 year-old girl playing with her mom, then climbed out of the pool, shut off his phone, and walked away. The remainder of the pool was open. Should I have called him out? I couldn't decide, and therefore didn't. This is normal now.
I think it's an issue of perceived benefit vs perceived risk. I see the utility in both technologies, but I assign significantly higher risk to smart glasses. I really struggle to imagine widespread abuse from dashcams.
Your desire to consent to being recorded in public places does not counteract my right to record everything I can perceive in public. Period.
I can't wait for the day brain-machine interfaces will become more advanced and commonplace (so cyborgs become something way more advanced than just limb prosthetics), and hope the day comes fast enough so the true issue is forced before any decisions are made off the ill-informed assumptions and the shuttle designs are left to depend on a width of horse's ass.
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
That doesn't seem as clear cut as you're implying.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Seeking and receiving information covers gathering facts, evidence, or observations from public events or spaces (e.g., documenting protests, government actions, police conduct, or everyday occurrences visible in public).
You might not like it, but its a key mechanism by which we, the people, keep despots and the police state in check.
But it still has to be iterated in light of such exceptions, that the rights encoded in the UDHR are there to protect humanity, as a species, so that we can indeed form our own cultures freely as we see fit.
The rights are there for all of us, and indeed they are generally aligned along natural human phenemonen, specifically for the purpose of allowing the weak and the strong to live as equals, universally.
Sure, you have the right as long as you have the gun. But you still have the rights once you lose the gun too, human.
I'm still going to avoid you like the plague.
The ability to record authorities is something I fully support, but I still don't want to be in that video if I can help it.
On top of that, most smartglasses are not private. If authorities can access the feeds, then my neighbor with RayBans becomes an authority, and it makes it that much harder for me to avoid them like the plague. This similarly applies to Ring doorbells and Flock ALPRs.