Banray.eu: Raising awareness of the terrible idea that is always-on AI glasses
banray.eu
banray.eu
I was 30 before I realized that when people recognize each other, it’s not from clothes and hair, or voice, or some kind of cognitive memory like “Bob has big ears and a wide nose”.
So, while I’m sympathetic and supportive of concerns about AI glasses, please also realize that to a subset of the population (about 1% IIRC), most of you already have a weird and privacy-violating skill, right there in the neurons.
Kind of like selling hard won skills as some kind of gate keeping.
Improving the quality of life of people cannot be done at the expense of the basic social needs of everyone else.
I was simply noting that there's a natural range of both abilities and expectations in this area, and it is a little entertaining that even the hint of a suggestion of an implication that maybe face recognition is perceived differently by different people provokes such a strong, fact-free response.
I totally get that face recognition is an issue for some. And that some tech may be of help with that.
But if said tech implies putting everyone at risk (because the privacy is not properly implemented in this tech, and because it is even obviously weaponised as it is today), it is a hard sell.
Fun to see my small project end up on hn. I think the project page and the blog post outlines most of why I'm doing this, but I'm happy to answer any questions or such. Cheers.
My phone and laptop already collect a ton of data that is more than I would like to share with a company that thinks of me as a product. But that data collection is unavoidable as a side effect of very useful functionality. We need to focus on trust, not restriction.
At some point, the regulatory/legal backlash will require hard personal responsibility (that is, jail consequences) for this to be taken seriously at the corporate and technical levels and so trust to be reinstated.
we could probably focus on both.
without sounding too cynical, by now we would be fools to continue trusting certain companies/industries.
we’re victims in an abusive relationship, “they won’t hit us next time, they promised.”
The pretext for these bans is always that unassailable cluster of feel-good yet vague virtues like privacy or the environment that you can make mean anything you want, but the reality on the Continent is just a rotating series of excuses for the catechism of "no, non, nein".
And it's never enough to just regulate the EU. Oh, no. The EU is the world's moral guardian, a "regulatory superpower", humanity's conscience. Obviously EU regulation should apply worldwide. The rest of humanity can't be trusted to care about privacy and the environment enough, right?
Well, I'm sick of it. How about they start saying ja to something? How about they walk about HOW we incorporate fledging technological capabilities into society instead of trying to freeze our information environment in 2008 amber?
At this point, when thinking about how we deploy new technology, I'm inclined to just leave Europe behind. Seal it off from the world of innovation with firewall rules and geofencing. The alternative is to suspend technology, the only thing that's ever in all history improved the human condition, for the sake of small-minded, small-hearted people who like mankind less than they love nein.
If all you have is taking sides with what ought to be dismissed, or rather, discussed and controlled, rather than let alone wild at the expense of most people, that's a choice that is yours.
https://cybernews.com/privacy/meta-flo-period-data-privacy-l...
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/mega_scandal/Onli...
https://apnews.com/article/google-smartphone-surveillance-ve...
https://www.security.org/identity-theft/breach/equifax/
4 major incidents and a site referring to dozens more, and that's just a few minutes of searching.
And that's only tech companies'(or tech related) misconducted. If we broaden the scope to corporations in general I'm pretty sure I would hit a post text limit before I even got through a quarter of them.
It's like the old saying goes "Every regulation is written in blood". Regs don't exist because someone doesn't want technology to progress. They exist because companies have shown time and again, as far back as you'd like to go, that they are not responsible members or society. They're willing to do anything in the name of profits, including mass privacy violations, abusing customers, and in extreme cases allowing people to die.
Even if we were to grant that these alleged privacy disasters causes harm, we'd have to balance them against the lost advantages of refusal to deploy the enabling technologies. It's like banning telephones on the account of everything crime anyone's ever organized over a phone call.
And, a fundamental right does not need an existing harm to be justified into existence: it is a right as first principle.
Regardless, your argument is predicated on the idea that violations of privacy and data collection is somehow fundamental to these services, in most cases it is not. Google and Facebook don't need to hoover up all your data to sell or use to advertise to you. They choose to, and the vast majority of users were/are unaware of it.
Beyond that, several of the articles I linked are for either negligence (failing to fix known issues) or collecting/using data without consent.